Chapter 8. Community Management and Web Operations
RUNNING A LARGE AND POPULAR WEBSITE means you have a lot of people relying on your service to be fast and available, whenever they want it. If you're lucky, they'll form a community of people who will interact and relate to each other in all sorts of interesting and creative ways.
Web operations is usually thought of as a purely technical field, and for the most part, it is. But when your very technical service affects people's lives (for better or worse), operations and engineering have to take human elements into consideration, and that requires a good deal of collaboration and communication. Failure and the response to failure are common concerns in this field, and there's a uniquely human element to those topics that can make or break teams and products.
To highlight this topic, I interviewed Heather Champ, who for five years has guided Flickr's community through both clear and rough seas and has seen more than 40 million people join and use Flickr's service. I was lucky enough to stand beside her during that time, and thought she could give some insight into how community management and technical teams work together.
John: Heather, what do you do?
Heather: I am the director of community at Flickr. That's my "Big Kahuna" name. Essentially, I'm a community manager at Flickr. "Community manager" is a very nascent role within a web team. If you poll a room of community managers, you'll come away with a number ...
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