About Practical Community Management

Hi! I am glad to see you here. My name is Nicolas. I am the founder of Stack Overflow In Russian (ХэшКод / hashcode.ru) and former Stack Overflow employee (read more about me).

During my time at Stack Overflow, I was lucky enough to meet a lot of amazingly wise people who taught me a lot. Unfortunately, we, humans, are designed in such a way that we lose what we don’t use. Knowledge is no exception. When I left Stack Overflow, my first thought was “It would be a disaster if I lose the knowledge I learned from the team. I must structure everything I know and share it with the world.” So I took a one year break and put down on paper everything I could remember. I’m excited to share with you what I’ve come up with - the Practical Community Management project.

Practical Community Management consists of three key components:

In terms of knowledge about online community management, the text course, the Udemy course, and the book have the same content, but there are small nuances.

The basis of the project is the text course. It is practical, deep and damn short. It contains all best practices that one needs to know to successfully build, manage and grow an online community. It is distributed completely free of charge (donations are very much appreciated).

For those who like to consume knowledge in video format, I created a course on Udemy. It is based on the first four sections of the text course plus I added quizzes on top of that. The video course is distributed for a small fee (please note that Udemy manages the price of the course dynamically on its own, I do not manage it).

The text course consists of knowledge in a concentrated form. I have tried to bring this knowledge to life through the context in which I learnt it. The result is a book on Amazon, “Practical Community Management: Lessons Learned While Working on Stack Overflow” (ebook and paperback). In the book I tell the story of how I created hashcode.ru, grew it to the point when the community was acquired by Stack Overflow and what I did after the acquisition to make it the most popular Q&A site for Russian speaking developers. At the end of the book, I share my perspective on why Stack Overflow is losing its relevance. I think the stories are interesting and the book is easy to read.

Please select the format that suits you best and enjoy it!

Have questions, ideas or suggestions? Please share them on practical-cm.com.