Community Connect 2023

"Fandom Creators Lab"

**Community Connect 2023** is an upcoming in-person/virtual hybrid event for admins of both newer and established communities to meet and connect with one another and with Fandom staff across our Community, Marketing, Product, and Engineering teams. The event will be held from April 23 - April 27, 2023 in Atlanta, Georgia. The goal of the event is to have direct, in-person conversations with a mix of editors and staff members to share what Fandom is working on throughout 2023 and to get direct feedback from community members.

## What is Community Connect?

We’ve held a number of Community Connect events throughout the years, beginning in San Francisco in 2015. We’d done some individual admin visits to our office here and there, and they became a great way to have those admins and our staff get to know each other better, and have pretty constructive conversations about feedback, pain points, and where we were going as a company. Not that we didn’t have constructive online conversations, but so much gets lost in a text-based conversation: nuance, emotion, and intention among them.

So we wanted to make that even bigger to bring more and more people together. Since then we’ve held in-person Community Connects in 2015, 2016, and 2020 (January—before the pandemic!). The pandemic meant we had to get creative, so in 2021 we held not one but two virtual Community Connects. Finally in May 2022, we were able to go back to an in-person event. Each of these events were a hit that were enjoyed by staff and attendees alike.

Want to know more about Community Connect? Hear it directly from our staff and attendees in this recap of Community Connect 2022:

## Topics

We're still working on our schedule, but here's some topics you can expect to hear about:

* **Fandom Brand Overview.** Fandom has grown a lot since last year’s Community Connect! Learn about the full Fandom brand overview inclusive of wikis, Fanatical, GameSpot, Metacritic, TV Guide, and more.
* **Product North Star.** The big questions at Community Connect are always about what sorts of features we’re going to build and improvements we’re going to make to the platform. Hear from our new Product leaders on the vision that we’re grounding ourselves in for product development this year.
* **Experimenting to Prove.** Continuing on our vision for product development in 2023, hear about our new experiment-driven approach as we test new ideas to see what moves the needle for editors and fans. This is where our theme of Fandom Creators Lab comes from—testing, testing, testing!
* **User-Generated Content.** One of our key product areas is User-Generated Content (UGC), which covers all the things about the editor experience. Hear from our UGC team about what we have planned for the year, and what the Community team is doing in support of those goals.
* **User Experience.** In addition to editors, there’s hundreds of millions of people who use Fandom every single year. We’ll take a look at some of the improvements we’ll be testing around the site for the overall user experience as well.
* **Structured Data.** Having new, scalable structured data solutions for all wikis is something that users and staff alike have wanted to see for years. We’ll take a look at some of the things we’re working on this year with structured data, how we built the infrastructure to support that, and what kinds of tools we may be able to build for the community that’s powered by it.
* **Generative AI.** Ever since ChatGPT exploded onto our collective radars in 2022, everyone’s been talking about generative AI and what it might mean. We’ll explore possible new AI tools that we may be able to provide to you to help make editing easier, and we’d love to hear from attendees what ideas they may have for AI on Fandom.

*Note: topics are still subject to change.*

## See also

* Attendees
* Fandom Hosts
* FAQ
* Schedule