Discourse Community Manager Paid Job

General
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I am posting to ‘General’ because this is a part time position that might appeal to those not looking in ‘Jobs’.

Job: Discourse community manager

Compensation: $10,000/year, $2,500 paid quarterly as independent contractor, prorated to time worked.

Supervisor: Executive Director of the SGB is responsible for hiring/firing.

Responsibilities:The Stan forums (https://discourse.mc-stan.org/ https://discourse.mc-stan.org/) are where most new users encounter the Stan community for the first time. The majority of those interactions are read-only but the content and demeanor of the forums are very important for both first impressions and for continued interactions. The manager is responsible, potentially by delegation, for:

  • Removing spam.

  • Scanning for inappropriate communications that violate our discourse guidelines

  • Developing and maintaining discourse guidelines.

  • Ensuring that questions get answered by answering the question themselves or seeking a relevant person to help.

  • Overall be a helpful voice on the forums.

  • Other responsibilities to be determined as the role matures.

I will wait until the Stan general meeting (Thursday Sept 12, 11am EDT) for the initial pool of applicants. The position will remain open until filled or withdrawn. The SGB will approve the candidate.

Email breck@mc-stan.org if you are interested. Just an expression of interest is fine. I’ll follow up with what further information I need.

thanks

Breck

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An important information is missing - what is the expected workload (in hours per week or similar)?

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Honestly I don’t know. I expect it to be bursty with slow weeks and heavy ones.

I’ll make a guess: On average 5 hrs/week. $10,000/(52weeks*5hrs) = $38/hr

Breck

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Whoever has the keys to the twitter account should send this out there too.

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Off topic but can we organize regular takeovers of the Stan Twitter account? It’s a good way to amplify the diverse applications and voices of Stan users.

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This job is open to people not in the USA. Taxes however are your responsibility.

Breck

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TIL there’s a stan twitter account.

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what examples do you have of spam that has gotten through? discourse provides tools for the community to flag spam and notifies admins when flagged messages need to be reviewed.

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why don’t we just make people read the faq when they sign up?
https://discourse.mc-stan.org/faq

that would take care of all of the bullet points except for making sure that questions get answered, which is pretty much impossible.

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I actually think we are getting the vast majority of questions answered - or at least “heard” in the sense that the person gets a reaction which (hopefully) helps them move forward.

I just checked and of the 5.4K topics started since the beginning of this forum, only 380 have no answer. And roughly 1/5th of those (estimated from the first 50) are announcements, so no response is OK. This should probably also include posts that have a reply by the OP, but the reply is not a solution or something like “Hey, I figured it out, nevermind” - not sure how to search for those. Our all time non-response is therefore around 6% which is IMHO great.

For the last 30 days (including today) we have 193 topics, 16 unanswered for a non-response rate of 8% (excluding announcements, I also checked single user topics with more replies and found all of them were either announcements or included solution).

Looking at the long-unanswered topics from the last 30 days, they don’t seem to be crazy difficult to answer, so I guess they were just overlooked and then disappeared from the front page.

So my best guess is that with reasonable additional effort, the amount of questions where the asker gets no reaction could be kept very close to 0.

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Moving discussion to own thread in publicity. Twitter guest host

Breck

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agreed - I think we have a good response rate. this issue was raised during the Stan meeting earlier in the summer, and a quick analysis of the site statistics matched the above numbers.
many thanks to all of the discourse participants who make this so!

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This is confusing. Is that prorated to 5 hours/week or just to how many weeks of a quarter you have the job?

I’ve removed a total of something like half a dozen spam mails total and I think I’ve been most active in doing so. I don’t think this is a big job.

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@breckbaldwin — is this position already filled? If so, this thread should say so.

I think it would be very useful for the community manager to manage the topics. As is, a gazillion messages get sent to general which should be sent to something more specific, or sent to algorithms when they should be sent to modeling.

1 Like
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I have selected a candidate and am awaiting SGB approval. They know who they are.

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Is this position filled or maybe vacant now? I was looking into it and would love to do it.

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@martinmodrak is the manager at this point. No idea on future plans.
If you are interested in helping out then communicate with Martin, there are may roles available.
And welcome to discourse.

Breck

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Thanks will do for sure! I like the fact that positions that are available for remote work keep popping up on forums like this as the situation after I lost my job is getting worse and worse! There are many things you can do online to earn money, but I personally prefer freelancing as it give me the opportunity to manage my time accordingly and be my own boss. That’s one of the reasons I would love to apply for the position you mentioned but since it’s not available I will have to stick the side hustle ideas that I’m already working on!