Hi Wazers,
As you all may have noticed - over the last year our community of Wazers - users, map-editors, area managers and other devoted participants - has been growing dramatically.
From less than 10 millions users at the beginning of last year - we are now approaching the 40 million Wazers world-wide.
Some communities and regions grew 5 times bigger compared to last year; our maps coverage, content and data size has doubled itself every 3 months; and the Waze community of editors kept the pace by adding more then 50k members.
In order to support such an amazing growth, We’ve been thinking recently of ways to optimize the communication flow and increase the availability of info for the community at large.
Here’s what we would like to achieve:
- Create better communication channels between the community and Waze team
- Better communicate Waze’s agenda and plans
- Increase the voice of the community in determining Waze’s agenda
- Increase the availability of information resources
- Allow more users to get more involved with specific areas of interest such as Navigation,
Mapping, Social Media etc - As part of the plan, we will also upgrade our forum’s platform to allow better performance and new interesting plugins
Please note that this “reorganization” is actually not very different from the existing structure. The idea is to reorganize the community based on the existing structure by introducing clearer rules, roles and communication flow between the community and Waze team, to improve the efficiency of our work together.
To do that, we’d like to start by introducing a new communication flow in the forums.
- Each active community will have its own “Local Champs” group. Local champs are the leaders of the local communities.
Local Champs will participate in the local champs forum, self management of area managers and help with other community projects.
Out of the local champs group, one user will be the “coordinator”. The coordinator will be in direct contact with the Waze team for assistance on issues that can not be solved locally. - Each local champs group will consist of the more experienced users in its community. The size of the group will be proportional to the number of local active editors’.
i.e, a community of 500 active editors will include a minimum of 5 local champs. This number will grow proportionally to the growing number of active editors.
The local champs group will have the rights to add as many new users as they see fit.
Entry to the local Champs’ group requires: - 6 months of Waze- seniority
- editing level 4
- 300 forum posts
->more criteria based on quality indicators will be added soon.
->These criteria do not provide automatic access to the champs’ group. Each request to join the group will still be verified individually.
Under this new reorganization, users with expertise in certain areas can apply to be “Experts”.
For example “editing Experts”, “Android experts”, “iPhone experts”, “navigation experts”, “beta editor experts”, “points experts”, “social media experts,” will now have moderator permissions over the relevant forums and their coordinators will have direct contact to relevant team members at Waze.
We’re open to expanding the range of “Experts” to include any new expertise that you may have in mind.
->Experts will be subject to the same entry level as local champs.
->Global Champs are the leaders of the global community. They will discuss high level issues in the Global Champs forum and work on high level projects.
They will be both Local and Global Champs.
The entry level to the Global Champs’ group is:
- 12 months of seniority
- editing level 5
- 600 forum posts
->more criteria based on quality indicators will be added soon.
->These criteria do not provide automatic access to the champs’ group. Each request to join the group will still be verified individually.
Communication flow:
- Local issues will be discussed in the local forums.
- Local forums will be monitored by the Local Champs.
- Professional forums will be monitored by the Experts.
- Local Champs can raise issues to Global Champs.
- If intervention by the Waze Team is needed – the coordinator will contact the community’s rep from Waze Team.
Each community will have their own dedicated Community Manager from the Waze Team who will be working with them on their local issues and needs.
The community managers will be in touch with you in the local forums in the upcoming days and will explain how we proceed.
We will soon share a form in which users who want and feel that they can be experts or coordinators can apply. Moreover, we will ask you to mention if there are other community members that you find qualified for one of these roles. We will review your answers and will chose the coordinators and experts based on applications as well as user experience.
We believe that this reorganization will help us provide better community support, and a better understanding of the community wishes and priorities.
Looking forward to hearing your feedback!
Thanks,
Shirli