Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-168424-20190130223012/@comment-20644-20190131231155

Totally fair perspective, especially if you’ve had someone on your wiki as a main point of contact who is no longer here. I get how it can be concerning.

Right now our biggest focus is on creating an organization that will support communities better than we have in the past. There’s a lot that we’ve had to change to get to that point, both in terms of staff of course but also just how we approach things. Product, Content, Community, and every other team has in someway had to reorient around to the notion that we are going to be more of a community-first company than we have been in previous years.

That’s part of why there haven’t been a lot of staff blogs either. The fact of the matter is that there hasn’t been a ton of major initiatives in the back half of 2018 that would require a staff blog. Even the Unification one we put out was the byproduct of a prior approach to communication. I had a whole plan for how that would be the kickoff to a new series, but we rightly decided that the rest of the series of blogs was premature. We needed to change some things internally, both on a product level and also just a strategy level, and going further into that series wouldn’t have been the right approach.

Strategy in general was our biggest focus in the last half of the year. We’ve done a lot of planning, changing of strategies, approaches, philosophies, etc in 2018 to prepare us for 2019 so we can hit the ground running. It’s not going to be long before we start showing some of the fruits of those labors, and hopefully over time you’ll start to notice how our approach has changed.

That goes back to staff accessibility and interaction with the community too. The goal, as we bring Fandom and Curse together and finalize what the different teams look like and what their roles and responsibilities are, is to make staff even more accessible and helpful than we were before. Overall the Community team here has been a pretty reactive team. We’ve always been there to help users when they come to us, and I think we’ve done a pretty good job at tending to individual user needs as they arise, but that’s a world where users would have to come to us. We want to be more proactive. We want to find better ways to communicate, including in real-time, and be much more involved in and engaged with supporting community needs.

I recognize that I used a lot of words to say very little in terms of specifics, but those specifics are still being decided. What I have talked about here though is a large part of what our philosophy is for approaching that, but we’ll be sharing more specifics soon.