Announcing the Stack Overflow Student Ambassador Program

If folks are going to represent a site, or network - especially in the context of a contest (of sorts) or in academia, they're probably going to need a solid grounding in network culture and community.

I've been here since the early days (when we had site contests!) and one often found that while events were a good way to get people to stay (I still have my first run SU T shirt, and the SSD I won in a contest!), a lot of people were here mainly just for the short term benefits

The more students you sign up as part of your Stack ambassador, the more perks you’ll earn at your pizza fund events. For example, sign up 10 students - we’ll provide the soft drinks. Sign up 20 students, and we’ll add dessert to the menu.

Sounds almost like a multilevel marketing scheme, to be honest.

I love the idea of getting people in early, but what are y'all doing in terms of mentoring (hopefully the next generation), outside throwing them challenges and letting them loose? Outside the MLH based hackathons (which is what this really seems to be built around) what does being an ambassador for the SO community mean to y'all. This feels like the perfect opportunity to mentor folks in a slightly more structured way than "Here's the site, don't drown".

Stack Overflow is looking for its first cohort of Student Ambassadors, leaders who will represent us on campus, partnering with us to bring more of their classmates onto our platform, and taking a leadership role to complete challenges, earn rewards, and help us plan what future semesters will look like.

This is eerily content free to me.

What's the goals in the long term - are we hoping to grow the community core with fresh blood? What's the deliverables, so to speak for the SO and SE communities from this program? What do the students get out of it beyond opportunities to network and so on?

You said,

Currently only students participating in colleges and universities affiliated with Major League Hacking will be able to sign up for the program.

I'm curious what's behind this restriction. For example, is this a regulatory thing that is being imposed on you by higher powers or are you doing it yourself to cut down on the number of applicants?

To be clear, I'm not requesting that this be changed, but any future request for a change would be best made with an understanding of the original reason for the rule and whether that reason is still valid. For example, something like "We don't really like this rule, but the program is funded from a grant from the National School Hacking Institute and they are threatening to take away the money if we don't enforce it." or "Preliminary surveys indicated that we would be inundated with millions of applications that we could never find time to individually evaluate, so we had to establish some arbitrary criteria that would bring the number of applicants down below ten thousand or so." could be valid answers.

Ya know... if ya'll want to make inroads in the student community, why not launch an attempt to replace Piazza?

Piazza is a more or less terrible thing that teachers (at least at my old school) like to use as a Q&A forum for assignment questions, etc. It's pretty bad. Not as bad as some tools, but pretty bad.

Why not give Teams away for free to university CS classes? It doesn't cost you anything, these classes aren't going to pay for Teams anyway, and it's the perfect onramp for these people to then want it at their real jobs.

I can probably find a couple CS classes at local universities to pilot something like this.

One of the goals of this initiative is to engage more with undergraduate students. As mentioned in the blog post, we want to learn how students engage with the site. We know students use Stack Overflow and many of the other technical Stack Exchange sites as a learning tool. This gives us an opportunity to get some meaningful feedback from them. This is also an opportunity for students to engage more with Stack Overflow and encourage their classmates to as well.

The reference to access to a Teams instance addresses the concern Journeyman Geek raised about what we are doing in terms of mentoring them outside of challenges. The Teams instance will be a place for student ambassadors to engage with one another during and outside of the challenges. It will be a closed space for them to engage with some of the Stackers who will be involved with the Hackathon Challenge. This is a place for them to be able to share things that would be considered off-topic for the site. It also gives us the opportunity to help guide them if we see something that would be a great Question to post on SO or one of the other sites. We want to encourage them to participate on the public sites when we see they have content that would be a valuable contribution to the community.

On a personal note I attended the Hackathon this past weekend with some other Stackers. I had the opportunity to chat with a number of students at the event who are already engaged with Stack Overflow. Students shared their love for the site with me. One of the comments that really stood out to me was “Thank the Community for keeping the quality of the content so high.” A recent graduate who was at the event as an advisor said “I owe a huge part of earning my degree to Stack Overflow.” It wasn’t a surprise to me that there wasn’t a single student who wasn’t familiar with Stack Overflow. Some students reported they were more active participants than others. They were all familiar with our FAQs and some mentioned looking forward to being able to participate and contribute more when they felt they had questions and answers to share that would be meaningful to the community.

Hearing feedback like that makes me really excited about this program. This is the pilot semester. We have to see how this works with the first few Hackathon challenges we’re involved with and to Journeyman Geek’s point see what the level of interest and engagement is from students participating. I’m really looking forward to seeing how this evolves and to seeing what contributions these students have to make as they become more involved with a community they are already a part of and have such respect for.

Hackathon participants are given access to the API for timed challenges. Hackathon participants do not have access to any data containing PII.

Does this mean our data (without any PII) will be available for students to "play with"?

If so, does this mean we will have the option / ability to opt out of having our data used in this if we wish?

It sounds like this is a great opportunity for SE to front-foot conversations with otherwise inexperienced users (putting aside the students who are already active on or experienced with SO).

In the upcoming months students will be encouraged to participate in Q&A on Stack Overflow in addition to other sites on the Stack Exchange Network where they have an interest and knowledge to share.

New users who are students on Stack Overflow are often linked with low-quality questions. We've had dozens (if not hundreds!) of discussions about homework questions, and questions along the lines of "I have this assignment question, what's the answer?" still plague the site.

These students, however, have the benefit of SE itself providing them with a welcome. Perhaps this welcome could include some of our existing guides on how to write an effective question, what expectations the community has of askers, what an MCVE is and what's on topic.

Posts and comments by staff members have indicated, to my understanding, that some of them went to a hackathon event and spoke to undergraduate students there, and found that a majority of those students were active contributors on SE/SO or were familiar with site culture, FAQs, and norms (i.e. they were not the ones flooding the sites with off-topic or poorly written questions and homework dumps). However, these people are not a representative sample of undergraduates: they are overwhelmingly the over-achievers who want to compete against the top programmers in their region. The average student, in my on-the-ground opinion as an undergraduate, does not know that much about site culture, and is more likely than not to be a homework-dumper.

I don't see a strong enough emphasis on making sure that when these students are introduced to the network by the ambassadors, they will be taught site culture. The blog post says "[more points for] every student you recruit to attend the event or sign up for our public platform." This is super easy for an ambassador to game. I'm sure the events will talk a little about how to ask a good question or write a good answer, but this points system still rewards ambassadors who bring in mounds of homework dumpers simply by getting them to sign up.

Furthermore, getting someone to sign up for a site is easier than getting them to visit an event, so there's a possibility that the ambassadors who aren't doing a great job and simply rapidly getting people to sign up (whether or not they are doing it maliciously) will get the bigger rewards.

Is there a safeguard against this that I missed?

I realise that a lot of critique has been levelled from the SO site and from those flooded with low quality contributions (admittedly that can be any site some days!), but I'm optimistic about the impact on the wider set of SE sites. SO and SU are something of a gateway drug to the wider SE community, which is wonderful in some ways, but also skews our user base towards CS professionals rather than other types of experts.

We have many niche communities on the platform which can really benefit benefit from a bit of fresh blood - it's down to our communities to make sure that fresh blood is encouraged to understand and contribute to our sites positively. Ideally before the sharks arrive, so to speak.

MLH seems like a sensible partner at this early stage, but it would be good to see attempts at partnering with wider networks of University groups and societies to draw out specialists for other sites in the network. For example, over on Biblical Hermeneutics we target academic-grade analysis of biblical texts at a very accessible level for undergraduate students, but most such students are completely unaware of the platform. I'm sure the same pattern holds for many other smaller sites, which may benefit from just having an extra 3-5 questions a day.