Interview with Anna Lear

User groups with lots to say, interviews and more, no way, sharing great ideas in the tech community. Fascinating conversations, a plethora of information find out for yourself today at ugtastic.com. Hi it’s Mike again with UGtastic. Today I’m sitting down with Anna Lear who is a community manager with Stack Exchange. Stack Exchange is a pretty large site and if you ‘re a developer you’ve probably have spent a good deal of time either asking questions or getting answers from the site. Thanks a lot for sitting down with me Anna, I really appreciate it. It’s good to be here. Thanks, can you tell me a little bit about what is Stack Exchange overall and what is a community manager and how did you get involved in that? Sure, well Stack Exchange is by now a network of a hundred question-and-answer websites. We started out with Stack Overflow which is a site for programmers of all kinds and pretty much any language and our basic goal is to provide a place or several places where people can come with their questions and they can get expert answers on whatever topic that they happen to be interested in. So as a community manager I’m part of a team there’s about six of us. What we do is we try to work with different sites and different communities and try to teach them about what makes a good Q&A website, what kind of things make up sites that are truly helpful. So what we usually do is we spend a lot of time, well okay let me back up for a second, each site including Stack Overflow has a corresponding meta site that allows its community to kind of gather and talk amongst themselves and determine how the site is going to run and handle different issues that come up. So as community managers we spend a lot of time monitoring those meta sites and jumping in to help out with answers and kind of sharing our expertise and lessons learned over the past several years. What are some of these meta sites? What is a meta site? It is literally pretty much exactly the same as any main site. So let’s say Stack Overflow on the main site on Stack Overflow you will have questions about programming you know C#, Java, whatever. On the meta site the only thing that’s on topic is Stack Overflow the site. So people would come in with questions about why a certain question was closed for example or what kind of things are on topic. They might want a clarification or they might want to say well we have a couple different tags that need to be merged. Can somebody help us out? And that happens basically with every community. We provide a way for the community to self-govern like that. So it’s a way to say oh you posted this WordPress configuration. Stack Overflow isn’t the right place to do that. Check out wordpress. is it wordpress.stackexchange yeah so I mean basically you help redirect people to the right place potentially yeah if somebody came to Stack Overflow and they posted a WordPress configuration question and it got well now it’s put on hold we recently rolled out some changes to make closing a little nicer but they might come to meta and they can they can ask why that happened and somebody would say hey we have this other site you know your question would be more welcome there okay so you’re you’re dealing with a lot of developers who are maybe dealing with an issue and they’re trying to get information do you ever have to defuse any kind of situations or get really angry over a question being closed? It certainly happens for sure. Our site moderators actually take care of a lot of those disputes. That’s what moderators are there for is to kind of keep things running smoothly. They’re all volunteers and they’re doing a fantastic job. But once in a while we as community managers also step in. I don’t know that it happens a lot but there’s definitely situations when somebody gets really upset and we have to be very careful about explaining to them how the site works without invalidating what they’re feeling and invalidating what their experience is. And so you work with a team of six people? Yeah, that’s a good question. We have a lot of volunteers and they’re all volunteers and they’re doing a fantastic job. But once in a while we as community managers also step in. I don’t know that it happens a lot but there’s definitely situations when somebody gets really upset and we have to be very careful about explaining to them how the site works without invalidating what their feeling and invalidating what their experience is. And so you you work with a team of six people and you mostly interact through Meta or do you work with the moderators? Um, yes to both. So we make heavy use of chat rooms. So Stack Overflow and Stack Exchange has a chat system as well. So we have internal chat rooms that we use within the team and across the teams at Stack Exchange and we also have moderator-only chat rooms where we talk to moderators and kind of provide more real-time interaction. So and as far as as the kind of information you’re probably seeing, I’m just curious, has there ever been, as you’re going in and moderating things, I mean I’m sure there’s some of the questions where you’re like, “Why are people asking this? Don’t they read the FAQ ?” But, as you’re going in and moderating things, I’m sure there’s some of the questions where you’re like, “Why are people asking this? Don’t they read the FAQ?” But, as you’re going in and moderating things, I’m sure there’s some of the questions where you’re like, “Why are people asking this? Don’t they read the FAQ?” But, as you’re going in and moderating things, I’m sure there’s some of the questions where you’re like, “Why are people asking this? Don’t they read the FAQ?” But, as you’re going in and moderating things, I’m sure there’s some of the questions where you’re like, “Why are people asking this? Don’t they read the FAQ?” But, as you’re going in and moderating things, I’m sure there’s some of the questions where you’re like, “Why are people asking this? Don’t they read the FAQ?” But, as you’re going in and moderating things, I’m sure there’s some of the questions where you’re like, “Why are people asking this? Don’t they read the FAQ?” But, as you’re going in and moderating things, I’m sure there’s some of the questions where you’re like, “Why are people asking this? Don’t they read the FAQ?” But, as you’re going in and moderating things, I’m sure there’s some of the questions where you’re like, “Why are people asking this? Don’t they read the FAQ?” But, as you’re going in and moderating things, I’m sure there’s some of the questions where you’re like, “Why are people asking this? Don’t they read the FAQ?” But, as you’re going in and moderating things, I’m sure there’s some of the questions where you’re like, “Why are people asking this? Don’t they read the FAQ?” But, as you’re going in and moderating things, I’m sure there’s some of the questions where you’re like, “Why are people asking this? Don’t they read the FAQ?” oh no that was one oh um yeah this is not going to be helpful something on stack overflow that ended up talking about railroads oh really i think yeah well now yeah now watch somebody try and find it and it’s going to be something completely different but uh yeah no nothing that’s off the top of my head that i can like point to right now just maybe is there so much information that you have to troll through to to to manage that it’s not much that you can actually read uh pretty much yeah i mean i don’t spend a lot of my time um anymore unfortunately uh like actually browsing stack overflow and reading questions for kind of personal um enjoyment uh most of the things i end up seeing right now are actually problematic in some way uh somebody emailed us to get support or i’m responding to a flag um for moderator attention or something like that so i end up seeing a lot of kind of average type stuff once in a while though i mean i still i still watch like hacker news and all that kind of stuff so great questions still happen and uh they get promoted in those ways yeah and um as far as dealing with people that are uh looking at trying to get their you know again with the questions trying to be answered uh are there any myths that you’ve run into where people make assumptions like i know on reddit people often get angry at the mods and there’s occasionally moderator revolts where they try to take down a moderator who people disagree with uh how they ‘re how they’re uh how a moderator decided a certain set of questions should or posts should be handled or changed rules uh is there any uh has there been anything like that that you’ve been struck at with stack exchange where you’ve you’ve had people directly come in conflict with a moderator or question oh definitely definitely uh there’s many many examples on metastack overflow of that um one that uh kind of sticks in mind uh is um not the last moderator election but the one before it i think uh we elected four moderators um and uh one of them i think at the time he was 19 and uh somebody and i think he closed the question i don’t exactly remember the specifics anymore but somebody came to meta and basically wrote this giant rant about how teenage moderators are ruining stack overflow and it is the worst thing that has ever happened so it was basically like he picked specifically on that moderator and um things just went downhill from there it was interesting you mentioned moderator moderator elections how does that work uh so about once a year uh give or take uh we run moderator elections so what happens is all of our moderators are volunteers uh and um when the site when a site is still in public beta um i should probably explain that too so when somebody before we create a new site in the network um we work uh from a list of site proposals uh that are brought to us by anybody on the internet uh we have a special site for that area 51 uh we have a special site for that area 51 uh we have a special site for that area 51 um and once a proposal uh gathers a certain uh number of followers and people who kind of commit to making that site a reality uh that site goes into a private beta for about a week to kind of hash out the immediate issues and whatnot and then it goes into a public beta and during that time it’s open to anybody anybody can participate and for that period we appoint moderators based on a few criteria people who were active early in the site who kind of showed aptitude uh for community moderation but once the site graduates from public beta uh we hold moderator elections uh so this gives the opportunity uh for any community members uh who are interested to nominate themselves uh and kind of you know basically they they come back come forth with their platform and kind of explain how they want to make the site better what you know what attracts them uh to being a moderator what they like about the site and uh then people vote for them and uh you know um and then people vote for them and uh you know and then people vote for them and uh you know uh so we have an entire system built for that it’s basically um open stv um i don’t know that so it’s um oh man the way it works is uh somewhat complicated and i can never quite remember that there’s a meta post on how exactly the votes are counted but it’s basically people pick their top three um picks and then um the first there’s a count of like first votes um that a person gets and then once they hit a threshold they’re elected and then like other votes that are cast for them trickle down to other people and yeah possibly not too familiar with that it’s it’s it’s i’m not gonna be able to explain it well but it’s basically sounds like you have three candidates and then you vote there’s a way to hash out which one actually got the most votes of the three candidates uh i’ll link to it in the show notes and then i ‘ll link to it in the show notes and then i’ll link to it in the show notes because i’m not from aust ralia i just know that it’s been explained to me by an australian uh that’s how it worked um so um okay so you know just uh to speak personally about you how did you get involved with stack exchange uh so i mean you talked about how moderators get elected but how how did the community manager position evolve and and how did you end up becoming one well how it evolved is slightly before my time um from what i know uh robert cartano uh he’s our director of community development uh he was the first community manager that stack exchange uh ever had and um all i know about that is that at some point he was approached by jeff atwood and they worked something out which is basically how pretty much everything i believe got uh done in those days um but uh eventually you know the team grew uh by the time i got to it uh i’m a software developer by trade uh so i joined stack overflow um didn’t really spend a lot of time on it uh but when programmers stack exchange launched uh i kind of really got into that and um it was um it was it was somewhat controversial uh at the time it uh it was proposed as a place where everything that’s off topic on stack overflow can live and that really didn’t work uh it just really created a terrible site uh and eventually it evolved you know and it and now it became kind of you know the the whiteboard side of stack overflow where you can kind of hash out you know software practices and design all that kind of stuff but anyway um i was elected a moderator on programmers so i nominated in the first election and ran um and from there i just discovered kind of the rest of the network um and i spent more and more time on metas uh and uh i eventually went back to stack overflow and became a moderator on stack overflow and from there i got the job is everybody on the community manager team coming through a similar path or um not necessarily uh unfortunately she’s no longer with us but we had um um a community manager earthy uh who did not have a developer background uh she uh got on the team through an internal um arrangement uh i think right now everybody on the team has some sort of development past okay so at the moment i’m not sure if i’m going to be able to do that but i’m going to everybody has a little bit of uh skin in the game so to speak of yeah understanding what what is being talked about and a concept of what is what is the the um spirit of the of the conversation on on stack exchange because it’s people who are marketing experts it’s people who are developers who are passionate about these topics and are good at working with a lot of people well on stack overflow for sure um i mean we have we have a lot of sites uh on topics that aren’t really developer oriented uh we have a site about cooking photography uh video games you know all that kind of stuff uh there’s definitely sites where none of us have any experience with whatsoever uh but a lot but most of the lessons that we’ve learned from stack overflow and from other sites they really just translate across the board so okay well thank you very much for taking the time to sit down with me i really appreciate it thank you you