August 2021 Community Update!
Dear Community,
I hope you all are well! Things are good here. The summer is winding down and my kids are back in school. My house is suddenly quiet.
We’ve been doing some intense work with researchers over the summer. They are looking at ways we can better match members with listeners in ways that increase higher ratings / satisfaction and decrease lower ratings / dissatisfaction. The goal is to ultimately map this to better health outcomes. Look for more on this soon!
Also, we’ve been doing a lot of work on the forums. The forums have needed some love for a while. Much of this is behind the scenes work, but will start to surface this next month. Soon the forums will load a lot faster and the forum search tool will be great. We are using something called elastic search. We will also soon be adding the ability to easily add images to forums. These changes will make the sub-communities and forums a world better.
I appreciate you all!
Heather
Hey, everyone! This month has been all about strengthening recognition!
The Daily Reviews Campaign has been doing so well that we’ve expanded on it! Shoutout to @considerateParadise6717 for maintaining every week’s post, and to our lovely community members who have been adding on and increasing our awesome listeners' level of exposure!
@imlistening01 has taken the lead on evolving this program to include graphics! This recognition effort is known as the Listener Spotlight!
To get an idea of what it looks like, please swing by this post! We could use some help on the adult side with reaching out to listeners. If you are an adult who would like to be a Project Agent for this program, please apply here or contact me (Heather225).
Lastly, we have launched a recognition program to honor our leaders called the Leadership Spotlight! Please take a look and consider nominating someone!
Laiba
The highlight of this past month for the Academy has been the Academy week, organized and led by @anotherfrenchtoastclub. We are grateful for the contributions to all our academy leaders and for those who participated in our events. Additionally, we launched an academy feedback form that everyone can use to provide feedback about the academy in general, specific programs and to recommend a new program.
In other news, we decided to close the Building Community program and will be bringing a new program for the community soon. Read the announcement here. We have also launched Alumni check-ins to gain more insight into how useful our program teachings are to our Alumni so we can continue to improve the academy experience. Lastly, to improve communication within the academy leadership, we launched weekly mentor check-ins to stay more informed of academy mentors activity status and to better support them.
Obs
In the Group Support front, we relaunched Mega Member Project to recognize, appreciate our super active members who go above and beyond to provide support in their own way to others as well as a leadership opportunity too.
In other news, we organized a 30 days Self Esteem Challenge in collaboration with the subcommunities. I am glad to hear that everyone who participated found it helpful so far. We are grateful to @lulurings & @Cheerymango to make it possible. Also, @fristo compiled a list of supportive phrases and questions that help one to have a deep conversation in the group chat room with others. While on the listener chatroom front, @amazingnutella24 & LSC PA Team organized and hosted Listener Sharing Circle 1 year Birthday party.
In group support leadership news, we onboarded two new Group Support Mentor Leaders - @annatess & @xe for Sharing Circle & Group Support Resources Management Track respectively. As well as onboarded a bunch of support team leaders to oversee and support a couple of support teams and projects.
Tazzie
This month, we onboarded 8 new Project Agents., 7 Community mentors and 9 new Forum Supporters.
Sub-community leaders collaborated with the group support team for a month long Self-esteem challenge.
Events continue to be celebrated in full swing across the community.
The Needs Reply Team completed another successful round of the Answerathon event.
We hope to continue growing strong both on the leadership and engagement fronts. Thank you to all leaders and team members for graciously supporting us time and again!
SoulfullyAButterfly
The content end of things has had lots of exciting progress. We have a newly onboarded team of writers and editorial assistants whose fresh work will be available for the community early next month!
As a result of the Academy Week, we had the pleasure of introducing a new group activity-based event called the Power of the Pen which we are considering to host regularly - keep an eye out for a notification to be able to vote and show interest in joining this writing experience.
The Q&A Approval Team which was onboarded around a month ago has done very well in clearing over 1K community answer submissions - if you are interested in helping out with this team, please click here.
Our Lightship Team has had a leadership change and will now be led by @DreamTouch and @ouiCherie - congratulate Cherie here - if you would like to join the leadership team of this social media-based project please consider joining as one of our Lightship Assistants.
Our Translation Projects are another opportunity for those who are interested in translating both the 7 Cups website and/or the app: view this post to help with the most active language groups we are looking to cover or apply for a language you are interested in!
Evelyne
The Safety Awareness Team has been in full swing releasing their 10th quiz! You can take this quiz here.
We have also been seeing great strides in the Anonymous Evaluations Team and Listener Coaching Team as they have been working hard to give feedback to listeners and do skill building.
Finally, we initiated a Listener Remediation Program where listeners who are not up to standards will be asked to do mandatory skill practice.
" Finally, we initiated a Listener Remediation Program where listeners who are not up to standards will be asked to do mandatory skill practice. "
@Evelynerose This sounds like a great new initiative, could we know more about this please? I might have missed out on the forum post regarding this new initiative ( if any made yet ) 😮 ! Thankyou for all that y'all do for ensuring the Quality on Cups ! ❤
@Sunisshiningandsoareyou
Sure! Forum post probably coming soon, the program is only just starting now so I haven't gotten to it yet. Basically the idea is that anyone who is performing not up to standards will have to go through mandatory coaching in order to take chats. Standards meaning they are getting a lot of bad reviews or indicators that they are not acting like a listener should be in chats.
Oh I see ,thanks for replying @EvelyneRose , seems like a great initiative forsure ! Hopefully can help us all improve the quality of listening and support ! :)
Matching members and listeners is not something that requires intense research, it requires common sense.
Fix the current system when it comes to members who are put into the general queue as discussed here:
https://www.7cups.com/forum/SiteUpdates_100/Feedback_37/TopicSelectioninListenerRequestsDoesNotChange_257109/
This system is far from ideal and does not make sense. Also, the bug discussed in the thread above has showed up recently (within the past few months) and made things worse.
Let members actually talk. Let them give a short description of their issue before being put in to the queue.
Members who seek out a listener will (or I hope, should) read through the listener profiles that show up in search and take a chance. Their choices are limited to available listeners and/or listeners who reach out to them personally through group chats or the forums. Listeners should be trusted with their ability to end a chat and refer the member to another listener if needed.
Personal requests are something that can be handled by users, but the automation behind the general request system makes zero sense and needs work.
@CowAtSeven Personally, I'm encouraged to see researchers involved.
The tradition at 7 Cups has always been to resist ideas from the community. I thought the discussion in your other thread was potentially useful, but forum discussions like that almost never result in action. Ideas coming from experts outside 7 Cups are much more likely to gain traction.
I think maybe this goes back to 7 Cups' early days at Y Combinator, when early design ideas for the website would come from Internet gurus in Silicon Valley, not the website's users. There is (or was) a video describing the process. For this reason I am hopeful that suggestions made by researchers at Carnegie Mellon might actually get implemented.
On the other hand I'm discouraged by recent bizarre examples of code quality issues, such as the terrible mess on the main forum page, and the nerdspeak message you now get if you happen to provoke the forum censor: API Error: [error 403 - ]. I can understand the reasons for (I guess) reducing duplication between the website and the app behind the scenes, but I can't understand the lack of testing. It's great, though, that provoking the censor no longer destroys everything you typed!
Charlie
@GlenM In case that seems strange to some readers, the search isn't stretchy 
Elastic is the name of the Dutch company that maintains it.
Charlie
@GlenM
Thank you so much for the update! 
Thanks also for all of the contributions that have been made by everyone! I can only imagine how much hard work goes into all of this. Changes in a positive direction sound fun and exciting. I'll wait to see them roll out. For me, I'm pretty grateful for what it is that we already have 
A nice surprise, ease of use, more bells and whistles never hurts though! 
@GlenM thanks for sharing
@GlenM awesome ! thank you so much for the updates <3
@GlenM
thank you 💓