Community Central
Community Central

It’s that time of year again: we are thrilled to announce that Community Connect 2024 is coming soon!

This year’s Community Connect will be from Sunday, April 28th to Thursday, May 2nd in Phoenix, Arizona. This year’s event will bring together 40 admins and editors from some of Fandom’s top communities, along with a number of Fandom staff members across teams like Community, Product, Engineering, and more. The event gives editors and staff alike the chance to talk face-to-face about what Fandom is working on this year, and provides an opportunity for attendees to provide feedback directly to staff about what they’d like to see from Fandom.

What we love most about Community Connect, and why keep hosting it, is that it’s always been about building genuine in-person interactions and dialogue between staff, admins, and editors alike—and to have some fun just getting to know one another throughout presentations, feedback sessions, and fun activities.

Continuing what we’ve been doing since 2022 and 2023, this year’s Community Connect will feature about 40 invited in-person attendees from the community as well as a virtual livestream for anyone else in the community to attend—and this year, the livestream won’t just be a Zoom stream, but a full virtual experience complete with virtual-exclusive programming, feedback, and potentially even some exciting rewards and opportunities.

Staff members from Fandom’s Community team will be reaching out to editors and admins soon to see if they’d be interested in attending. In the meantime, let’s take a quick look at some of the details about Community Connect past and present.

What is Community Connect?[]

Connect Connect has long been a popular event that brings together community members and Fandom staff members alike. We’ve held several of them over the years, beginning all the way back in our San Francisco office in 2015. We’d previously done a handful of individual wiki admins visits to our SF headquarters, which seemed like a great way to have those admins and our staff team in SF get to know each other better and have constructive conversations about feedback, platform pain points, and where we saw the future of Fandom (Wikia back then) going. We had pretty constructive online conversations without admin visits too, but in-person conversations gave us the opportunity to have the nuance, emotion, and clear intention that can sometimes be missing from text-based chats.

So in 2015, we thought: how can we make that even bigger and bring more people together at once? Since then, we’ve held in-person Community Connects in 2015 (SF), 2016 (SF and Poznan, Poland), January 2020 (Disney World in Orlando, Florida), 2021 (virtually—twice), 2022 (Universal Studios in Los Angeles, California), and 2023 (Atlanta, Georgia). Each of these events were a hit that were enjoyed by staff and attendees alike.

But the best way to learn about Community Connect is to hear it directly from our staff and attendees in this recap of Community Connect 2022, held at Universal Studios in Los Angeles, California:

Event Programming[]

We’re not quite ready to share any programming details yet. Right now we’re focused on the logistics of the event and getting the basics up and running—like hotel rooms, locations of group dinners and activities, the look and feel of the event's design, and beginning the invite process. And one of our biggest priorities now is kicking off the initial outreach to see who would be interested in attending.

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 2024, and we want to be able to fit in as many conversations about it as possible. We’ll also give a look ahead to the years to come, as well as look back on the last year or so—challenges and all.

As always, one of our biggest focuses will be to put a spotlight on the work that we’ll be doing around editors and creator tools this year. In 2022 we announced the creator tools roadmap that we completed (like mobile theming and moderation tools like Discussions AbuseFilter, Post History, and Reported Post Notifications). Then in 2023 we talked about how we’d be reversing a trend that saw a decline in editors (which we successfully reversed), introduced Fandom's version of the Thanks extension, and introduced some of our early work on new structured data applications for Fandom. Stay tuned for more information on what we’ll be talking about this year!

How to Attend[]

In-person attendance at Community Connect is on an invite-only basis, and our Community Managers will be reaching out to potential attendees soon to gauge their interest in attending and invite them. But, you’re still in luck even if you don’t get an in-person invite!

Just like last year, we’ll be streaming Community Connect online so anyone in the community can watch—that way everyone can hear what’s going on. This year, we’re making our virtual presence more robust with a slate of virtual programming, some virtual exclusives, and more. Additional information on virtual invites and attendance will be shared as we get closer to the event, including a schedule.

More Info to Come[]

We’ll have a lot more information to share once we get closer to the event, and you’ll be able to find a lot of it either here on the Fandom Staff Blog or on our Community Connect Wiki—including access to the livestream, the virtual and in-person schedule, and more.

In the meantime, feel free to let us know if you have any questions about Community Connect and we’ll do our best to answer with what we know so far. Thanks!


BrandonRhea
Fandom Staff
Hey I'm Brandon, VP of Community at Fandom.
I'm a huge fan of Star Wars, Star Trek, and Marvel.
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