I joined the CEA Online Team in late 2021 as a software engineer. Most of the time I’ve been on the team, I’ve been focused on building parts of the Forum that are outside of the core reading/writing experience (such as groups and connections). I still believe in my heart that this was worth working on, and that it can be particularly valuable to build out these non-core features on the margin. I have a soft spot for making “doing good” more accessible and helping more people find ways to take concrete steps, and I think the Forum is well-placed to do that.
However, as mentioned above, I think that the value of these non-core features depends on having a strong and healthy Forum community. Faced with being actually responsible for the success of the Forum, I’ve (sadly) decided that our team needs to drop most work on non-core features, and even most of the product/engineering work on core features. We’re down to approximately 1.5 FTE of software engineering on the Online Team, and much of that is taken up by non-Forum work (such as the recent CEA.org redesign). Instead, we are focusing on increasing the amount of high-quality content on the Forum, via a combination of community building and more actively steering the Forum ourselves (such as with more themed events and revisiting our moderation processes).
Since I’m relatively new at this interim role, I feel like I still have a lot to learn, and I’m probably making some mistakes. So I will again emphasize that I am very open to and interested in feedback, especially if you have any disagreements on how/why the Forum is falling short, or disagreements on how the Online Team should be spending our time.
More on where I’m coming from
I joined the CEA Online Team in late 2021 as a software engineer. Most of the time I’ve been on the team, I’ve been focused on building parts of the Forum that are outside of the core reading/writing experience (such as groups and connections). I still believe in my heart that this was worth working on, and that it can be particularly valuable to build out these non-core features on the margin. I have a soft spot for making “doing good” more accessible and helping more people find ways to take concrete steps, and I think the Forum is well-placed to do that.
However, as mentioned above, I think that the value of these non-core features depends on having a strong and healthy Forum community. Faced with being actually responsible for the success of the Forum, I’ve (sadly) decided that our team needs to drop most work on non-core features, and even most of the product/engineering work on core features. We’re down to approximately 1.5 FTE of software engineering on the Online Team, and much of that is taken up by non-Forum work (such as the recent CEA.org redesign). Instead, we are focusing on increasing the amount of high-quality content on the Forum, via a combination of community building and more actively steering the Forum ourselves (such as with more themed events and revisiting our moderation processes).
Since I’m relatively new at this interim role, I feel like I still have a lot to learn, and I’m probably making some mistakes. So I will again emphasize that I am very open to and interested in feedback, especially if you have any disagreements on how/why the Forum is falling short, or disagreements on how the Online Team should be spending our time.