Webcast
Golden Rules of Building Online Communities that Matter
August 19, 2020
Office of the CTO Speaker Series #1
Online communities for programmers, like Stack Overflow and GitHub, have norms that are not obvious nor inclusive to the 50 million programmers visiting monthly. For example, many novices ask questions that go unanswered or downvoted for not conforming to unwritten community norms. In addition, the most popular online programming communities have reported having below 7% participation from marginalized developers such as women and non-binary people. But how do these norms and demographics shift for developers across the globe? Are there differences in which projects developers decide to contribute to? In this talk, I will 1) offer a perspective of understanding what can inhibit participation, 2) describe what mechanisms developers are using to alleviate their own frustrations with communities, and 3) outline what on-platform mechanisms can intervene to better support engagement based on rigorous research.
Time: 9:30am PST
Speaker
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Dr. Denae Ford Robinson
Senior Researcher, Microsoft Research