Stepping down as the community manager

General
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Hi everybody,
I am stepping down as the community manger here. The main reason is that taking care of the forums is no longer compatible with my other commitments (as you may have notied by the increased lags of my responses here in the past few months). If you wonder what project could be so great that I would prefer it to working with the Stan community, it is mostly childcare - which I can recommend to anybody as a great case study on how hard it is to make good decisions in the context of a non-stationary, partially observable process :-D

We made some preparations with the SGB and you should expect an announcement looking for my replacement shortly. I will continue to fulfill the role as much as I can during the transition and I should be able to also do some onboarding of the next community manager.

There are a few projects I plan to finish during the transition:

All in all I had a great time as a community manager. Trying to help other Stan users has let me to learn a lot about all kinds of models people run and ways they can fail, which has definitely made me a better statistician. I hope to be able to still stay among the active users of the forums. I thank everybody who I’ve worked with over the time - there are so many great people pouring energy into making Stan and the community work well and I am very grateful for that.

I also did a bunch of mistakes in my role as a community manager. I didn’t manage to maintain good relationship with several prominent community members. I also did overreach a couple times, trying to exert control over situations where that wasn’t really a great idea. Additionally, after a period of growth, last year has seen the activity on the forums decline a little on basically all metrics available. Obviously, volume is less important than quality of forum content and it is quite possible one can blame part of the decline on the pandemic. However, we would probably treat increase in activity as a mostly good sign, so we must therefore also accept that decrease in activity is mostly a bad sign.

I hope the next community manager will be able to learn from my mistakes and do better than me in those regards.

Thanks again to everybody, I’ve been honored to be in your service.

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You’ve done a great job, Martin.

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You have done great work Martin! Thanks!

Also congrats on the new addition :)

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I hope you continue to be part of the community when you can. Thank you for your contributions as a community manager. And in your own words:

Best of luck with your model!

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Big thanks for the work you’ve been doing!

Stan related R package downloads have also stopped increasing during the last year, so I would assume that the change in the forum activity is more related to the change in the total number of users, and there hasn’t necessarily been much change in the proportion of users posting to the forum.

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Thank you Martin for all your contributions as the first community manager!

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Thanks for all your work Martin!

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Thanks for all your help, Martin. I said it once before ;) but I’ll say it again - you did a fantastic job. Best of luck with your future endeavor; parenthood’s a trip.

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Martin,

you have been an outstandingly good community manger! Thank you for all the work you have put into the Stan community! Others have said that one of the greatest assets of the Stan project is its community. And I’m very sure that a lot of people here on the forums will agree that you are one very important piece of this success story. So, again, thank you!

And all the best to you for building your new mini-community! I’m sure you’ll do a phenomenal job there as well. :)

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You are going to be hard to replace. Best of luck.

Breck

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Congrats on the new addition, and thanks for all you’ve done for the community in this role!

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Thanks for all those thoughtful, patient comments @martinmodrak! Best of luck.

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Thanks for doing such a great job as a community manager Martin.
I think the way you handled the social aspects of the community and your diligent and insightful responses to many questions have made the Stan forum a welcoming and resourceful place for people with very different backgrounds.

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Thanks for all of your hard work! You’ve always been most helpful!

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Thank you @martinmodrak for all the help you gave me ant to the all the userbase.

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