User blog:Brandon Rhea/Announcing Fandom's 2023 Community Connect in Atlanta

Great news: Fandom is going to be hosting another Community Connect this year!

This year’s Community Connect will be from Sunday, April 23 to Thursday, April 27 in Atlanta, Georgia. We’ll bring together 50 admins and editors along with dozens of Fandom staff members to talk face-to-face about what Fandom is working on this year for editors and fans. This will give attendees an opportunity to provide feedback directly to staff members working on 2023 initiatives about what they think of those projects and what they’d like to see from Fandom. Most importantly, the success of Community Connect has always been about building deeper connections between staff, admins, and editors alike, and to have some fun just getting to know each other over different activities.

Continuing our return to post-lockdown normal from last year, this year’s event will feature about 50 invited in-person attendees from the community along with the ability for anyone else to virtually attend via livestream. In-person invites will be going out soon.

What is Community Connect?
We’ve held a number of Community Connect events throughout the years, beginning in San Francisco in 2015. We’d done some individual admin visits to our office here and there, and they became a great way to have those admins and our staff get to know each other better, and have pretty constructive conversations about feedback, pain points, and where we were going as a company. Not that we didn’t have constructive online conversations, but so much gets lost in a text-based conversation: nuance, emotion, and intention among them.

So we wanted to make that even bigger to bring more and more people together. Since then we’ve held in-person Community Connects in 2015, 2016, and 2020 (January&mdash;before the pandemic!). The pandemic meant we had to get creative, so in 2021 we held not one but two virtual Community Connects. Finally in May 2021, we were able to go back to an in-person event. Each of these events were a hit that were enjoyed by staff and attendees alike.

Want to know more about Community Connect? Hear it directly from our staff and attendees in this recap of Community Connect 2021:



Event programming
Right now we’re focused on some of the earliest logistics for the event&mdash;things like determining locations of dinners and activities, deciding on the overall design of the event, and getting invites out to people who will attend in-person. As we settle on a lot of those logistics, we’ll begin focusing on what we’ll be talking about at the event. We have a lot going on at Fandom in 2023, and there’s only so much time at Community Connect, so we’ll be taking a look at the biggest things we want to get in front of attendees. That includes the work that we’ll be doing around editors and creator tools this year, so stay tuned for an agenda as we get closer to the event!

How to attend
Attending Community Connect in-person is on an invite only basis, and our community managers will be reaching out to potential attendees soon to personally invite them. But you’re still in luck even if you don’t get an in-person invite!

Just like last year, we’ll stream the event online so anyone in the community can watch. We want to make sure anyone who wants to at least watch Community Connect is able to, so we’ll share details about virtual attendance in the weeks prior to the event.

COVID-19 safety protocols
Like last year, the safety of our attendees and staff is our top priority. Those attending Community Connect in-person will be required to provide proof of vaccination against COVID-19. We’ll also be requiring on-site COVID-19 testing each day of the event. These will be self-administered using tests provided by Fandom at no cost to attendees.

More to come
Once we get closer to the event, we’ll post more information on our Community Connect Wiki and let the community know how to access the livestream, as well as what will be livestreamed (like presentations) and what won’t be (like breakout groups). In the meantime, feel free to let us know if you have any questions about Connect. Thanks!