So how was our 2015? Busy. Really busy.

We hired ourselves into a full team.

We re-launched our website.

We dived deep into user research.

We made you a card game.

We started coding.

We talked at more than 30 events in New York, Minnesota, Austin, Philadelphia, Los Angeles, London, Quebec, Hamburg, Singapore, Perugia, Buenos Aires. You can see Andrew’s talk on trolling in the news here, Andrew and Sydette talking to the Community Mangers meetup here, and among Greg’s many, many talks was a panel on trolls and free speech you can watch here.

Most importantly, we listened to our users, and are close to testing our first product: a listening tool to help publishers find their most trustworthy contributors.

If 2015 was the year in which we went out – to introduce ourselves, to listen to our users, to share the knowledge we had gathered – then 2016 will be the year of welcoming you all in.

We are about to open everything for more discussion, more contributions, more involvement. And we want you to join us.

We’ve released our Code of Conduct, defining the standards to which we want you to hold us, and yourselves, accountable. Versions of it will be part of everything we do.

When we open up our community forum, you will be able to participate in threads and discussions with the team around what we’re doing, what you’re seeing, how community is working inside and outside of newsrooms.

Our remaining private Github repos will be opened up on January 1 for you to understand more about the code we’re using, and to submit pull requests to join us in doing it even better.

Our first event will be held in partnership with MIT, bringing together journalists, commenters, activists, and professionals to talk about what it means to go beyond comments into more meaningful onsite interactions.

We will publish best practices from different moderators and community experts, to help publishers improve their thinking around moderation and engagement.

You’ll also hear from many more of our team members as we discuss the various component and considerations of building our tools.

With all that in mind, we are taking the rest of 2015 off to prepare for an exciting 2016. Have a wonderful holiday season. It’s going to be a great year.

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