Community Signal

Do you have a 60-second pitch for your community? In this episode of Community Signal,  Colleen Young , community director for  Mayo Clinic , raises the challenge of being able to deliver a concise and impactful pitch to other leaders at the nonprofit. "I'm just imagining finding myself in the elevator with this leader by happenstance and being able to finally say something just in two floors that...

Are you able to step away from your community for days at a time? When you return, are your team and the community still running smoothly? If you answered yes to these questions, then congratulations! Whether it's documentation, systems, or setting proper expectations with your boss and colleagues, those boundaries and structure are crucial, not just for yourself, but for the people around you and...

Earlier this month, blogging pioneer  Jason Kottke   tweeted  that "social media would be a better place to connect with people if the folks building and using these services had spent formative time on and taken inspiration from Flickr and MetaFilter instead of 4chan and Reddit. Gardening vs. waste management." That tweet spoke to Patrick who retweeted it, and that retweet elicited a reply from ...

If you threw a random group of people together, united primarily by a shared educational goal that they can accomplish with or without the group, and had two weeks to build a sense of community among them, what would you do? That's what  Alex Witkowski  spends time thinking about. He's the community lead for  Section4 , which offers business courses they call sprints. These sprints are typically a...

If you work in content moderation or with a team that specializes in content moderation, then you know that the fight against child sexual abuse material (CSAM) is a challenging one. The  New York Times   reported  that in 2018, technology companies reported a record 45 million online photos and videos of child sexual abuse.  Ralph Spencer , our guest for this episode, has been working to make onl...

As community practitioners, we often serve communities that we don't necessarily belong to. But how would you approach designing a community platform, events, and policies for a demographic that you don't belong to?  Alexa Wahr , the COO of  Revel , a community for women over 40, says that she and her co-founder build by putting their community first. "We absolutely listen to our members. We don't...

How did the pandemic impact your relationships with your healthcare providers? Did telehealth enable you to continue seeing or connecting with your providers to receive the care that you needed? In this episode of Community Signal,  Denzil Coleman , a telehealth coordinator, developing and maintaining digital health interventions at the  Medical University of South Carolina (MUSC) Center for Teleh...

In between his three albums, rapper  Asher Roth  has released several mixtapes, including 2011's  Pabst & Jazz  and his  The Greenhouse Effect  series. The third entry in that series,  The Greenhouse Effect Vol. 3 , hit streaming services on September 3, 2021. But there's something about his latest mixtape that makes it unique from every album, EP, and mixtape he's released so far: It was a collab...

What moderation tactics have you used or seen as a mechanism to curtail the spread of misinformation in communities and on social media platforms? Word detection, link blocking, and digital stickers promoting legitimate information sources may immediately come to mind. But what would happen if you ran your moderation tools against URLs shared in link-in-bio services used in your community? Or what...

When was the last time you mandated that your community, moderation, trust, and safety colleagues schedule time for out of queue activities? When was the last time you led by example and took a break or participated in other wellness activities  before  you felt burnout? What was the last tool your product team built to help foster resiliency for your moderators? While we can't mitigate all burnou...

May 21st, 2021 marked 20 years since the launch of  KarateForums.com . In this episode of Community Signal, Patrick speaks with five forum members that have been on KarateForums.com for nearly 65 years, collectively. Together, they discuss what keeps them coming back to the community as members, moderators, and martial artists.  While each member brings different experiences and background to the...

For this episode of Community Signal, we're joined by community professionals  Jenn Hudnet ,  Lana Lee , and  Phoebe Venkat . They candidly share stories about the impact of racism and stereotypes against Asians, Asian Americans, and Pacific Islanders in their own lives, in the workplace, and in the communities they manage. Jenn, Lana, and Phoebe each had stories to share about their families, the...

Crisis Text Line  offers free, 24/7 support via text message to anyone facing a mental health crisis. Some organizations partner with Crisis Text Line to develop co-branded text lines for their community, but starting today, you can make Crisis Text Line part of your policy and response strategy if anyone in your community or on your team shares or shows signs that they're experiencing a mental he...

Last month,  Sophie Zhang , a former data scientist at Facebook,  went public as a whistleblower  drawing attention to how the company delayed action against or outright ignored manipulation of it's platform by autocratic leaders and global governments to the detriment of the people of those countries. All work, including community management, requires trade-offs, areas of focus, and prioritizatio...

If you were designing a curriculum to teach undergrads about community management, what would you cover?  Georgina Donahue's  approach in designing such a curriculum for a course at the University of Massachusetts was grounded not only in her experience as a community professional but also in her understanding that as a professor, she was instructing a community of students getting ready to enter...

Lee Felsenstein's  work in tech and social organizing led to the creation of the  Community Memory  project, the first publicly available social media system and public computerized bulletin board system. Mr. Felsenstein was also a founding member of  the Homebrew Computer Club , and he helped develop the personal computer. So, what was the first publicly accessible computerized bulletin board lik...

The  Zombies  game mode within the popular  Call of Duty  video game franchise has created a massive community of fans and players who not only play and connect with the developers, but with each other as they try to discover every aspect of each piece of content released for the game. In two versions of the game, they are even able to create their own content that can be played and shared online...

In addition to practicing community management as a profession, many of the listeners, guests, and even members of the team behind Community Signal, manage communities part-time. These might be communities that align with our personal passions or hobbies or communities that exist specifically to help ourselves and others grow. That is exactly the mission of  Muslamic Makers . Co-founded by  Arfah...

The field of community management is buzzing. We have more tools available to us than ever before and an abundance of communities and resources to connect us with fellow professionals who know our work and want to share knowledge. But what goes into creating inclusive, diverse, and truly open and welcoming spaces for community professionals? Who is given a platform to share knowledge? In this conv...

What would happen if you woke up tomorrow and couldn't share any news articles on Facebook? How would that impact the communities that you manage or the way you share information with family and friends? What if this ban included  information provided by emergency services agencies for things like natural disasters, wildfires, and domestic violence? This situation is not a hypothetical one for Aus...

What are the topics of discussion that you would expect to come across in a weather community? Storms, climate change, and forecast accuracy are part of the conversation. As a community strategist at  Weather Underground ,  Michelle Schlachta  also encountered stories of people that experienced traumatic weather-related events and sought the community out for education and healing. Those are conne...

If you have ever used Google to look up a restaurant you wanted to eat at or to research before visiting someplace new to you, you've probably depended on information contributed by a Local Guide.  Traci Cappiello  is the program manager at Google that makes sure those  Local Guides  feel engaged and empowered to provide helpful information to the world. With 100 million people who have contribute...

If you were building a community product, how would you start? Who would you choose as your first hire? What efforts would you make to ensure that the product is inclusive, safe, and well-moderated? In this episode of Community Signal, we're joined by  Danielle Maveal  to do a deep-dive on audio-first platforms and specifically,  Clubhouse . While every platform and community has moderation issues...

There are many different categories of diversity and, as community practitioners, continuously learning about them and questioning our assumptions will only help us build more inclusive communities. In this episode of Community Signal, we're joined by  Wesley Faulkner , a DevRel advocate at  Daily , who also advocates for neurodiversity. Wesley and Patrick discuss several ways in which we can buil...

This episode marks 5 years of Community Signal! If you tune in, you'll hear Patrick share a thank you for the incredible guests and collaborators that have helped get us here, in addition to the sponsors and Patreon supporters that have generously supported this work. We're proud to share the stories and learnings of our peers in the community industry and Patrick, Karn, and myself look forward to...