The members of the Community Management Team (sometimes referred to as the Community Team or CMs) are employees of Stack Exchange the company, but not all SE employees are Community Management Team members. When visiting the profile of staff members there is an orange label indicator of that on their page, but since not all staff members are CMs, how do I recognize the CMs?
Also, what is their role on these sites? Are they moderators?
What is their relationship to the "Community" user?
Here is the list of people who make up the Community Management Team (aka CM, CMs), in order of hire date:
| Name | Flair (links to blog or article announcing them) | Subteam | Title |
|---|---|---|---|
| JNat |  |
Community Engagement and Enablement | Staff Community Manager |
| Cesar M |  |
Trust & Safety (Team Manager) / Community Support (Team Manager) | Senior Manager |
| Rosie |  |
Community Engagement and Enablement (Team Manager) | Director |
| Philippe |  |
VP of Community / Community Strategy (Team Manager) | Vice President of Community |
| Slate |  |
Community Strategy | Senior Community Manager |
| Charlotte |  |
Community Support | Community Manager |
| SpencerG |  |
Community Engagement and Enablement (Team Lead) | Senior Community Manager |
| Bella_Blue |  |
Trust & Safety | Senior Community Manager |
| Berthold |  |
Community Strategy | Staff Community Manager |
| Dalmarus |  |
Community Support (Team Lead) | Senior Community Manager |
| Emerson |  |
Trust & Safety | Associate Community Manager |
| Sasha |  |
Community Engagement and Enablement | Community Manager |
The Community Management Team is part of the broader "Community Team", the staff members focused on the needs of the Stack Exchange communities and the strategy and planning for community initiatives. You can read more about the entire team in this post.
Explaining the breadth of what the CMs do is complicated and difficult to enumerate, but here are some of the things they've done and continue to do over the years:
They help you out. No, really. But yeah, that's about the most generic non-answer ever.
They review proposed sites passing through Area 51, revising, raising concerns, closing, destroying, and preparing for their launch as the situation warrants.
They liaise with Stack Overflow’s product development teams, serving as a voice of the user and managing the community-facing communications.
They moderate brand new sites as they launch, answer questions and attempt to communicate lessons learned on past sites. They run the process to obtain the initial set of Pro Tem mods, and hand the site off to them.
They're the key outward facing representatives of the Stack Exchange upper administration.
They watch the various and sundry meta sites, answer questions, address or escalate requests and provide guidance in the use of the site's tools.
They occasionally answer emails.
They review moderator actions, offer advice, resolve disputes.
Now and then, they sleep. One eye open. Like birds.
While CMs hold moderator privileges on every network site and much of their work touches on moderation, they are not part of the site moderator teams. No elected or appointed moderator is an employee of the company, while all CMs are. Some have gone from moderator -> employee and vice versa, but the orange "Staff" badges on their pages indicate clearly if they work for the company. If you're curious about who has made that switch, it's documented here.
No, they are not. The Community "user" is really used for when the system takes an action and the log needs to reflect which user did it (or is used as a placeholder when a user is removed). Community, for that reason, is designated as a Bot. Questions about actions taken by the system can be asked under the Community user tag: community-user.
There are four sub-teams within the Community Management team:
There is also a VP. He manages one of the subteams (Strategy), but he describes himself as mostly running around the network making a nuisance of himself.