Hello Squids!

This is a note about three things:  What I do as a Squidoo employee, what you can expect from the SquidU forum, and how I want to help our best lensmasters, more.  I'd love for you to take 5 minutes and give it a read.

I've been on Squidoo for almost three years. Three years! When I started, I was a passionate lensmaster like everyone here. Not an employee, but a really excited user. I actually quit doing the HTML web design I was working on at the time to focus on regular lensmaking because I believed in the process and potential and people so much.  Like many of you, I was instantly addicted.

After about a year of making lenses, Megan showed up in my email box one day with a fulltime job offer. Essentially: "Come be our official community organizer; work with lensmasters, for lensmasters."  I don't need to tell you that I said "yes!"    Being an "official admin" definitely has some perks and I get to suggest new features and messaging and help get the community get some of the stuff it needs, but it's also easy to start missing the forest for the trees.  When a community gets more active and more popular, it's easy as the "Community Organizer" to fall into an overseer / bug responder / officer role.  When what a growing community really needs, I believe, is someone there on the ground, sleeves rolled up, playing with them and next to them and continually teaching them and hearing them and really championing them.
     
What does this mean to you?  To summarize the high points, here are four changes you can look forward to:

1. I'm going to be spending more time here on the forum with you. Starting today, I'll be handling all forum "mod" duties and generally just hanging out and playing more.  Adez7 is retiring as forum moderator, joining an elite group of very brave volunteers who previously held the role (like Glen and JeffryV), and will still be around, like all of you, answering questions and sharing tips.  But going forward, I'll be handling those rare sticky cases, which you're always free to report directly to me using the "report" link at the bottom right of every forum post. (I've been the final say in forum moderation, so this really isn't a new policy.) Adez7 has put in many months of wonderful, dedicated, tireless volunteer work here. Largely thanks to him and dozens of other great leaders here, SquidU is a self-running, self-healing, growing, no-tolerance, and positive spot for newbie and successful lensmasters alike. That rocks.

2. It's always been our policy that SquidU is a peer-driven forum for lensmasters to share, interact, vent, and learn.  I'm here to help that keep running, even more smoothly and fairly and happily.  As such, I need to remind everyone that we don't answer official questions or demands here, nor do we reply to bug reports on the forum. I'm here as your go-between and champion for highlighting issues and sending in lists of your ideas and suggestions and problems. I'm also here to handle the rare cases of warning and banning people who get too out of line, deleting spam and locking spam threads, and keeping an eye out for the goodness of the group.

3. As Community Organizer, I get a LOT of email from lensmasters. I get suggestions and bug reports via Twitter, notes and complaints in my personal Facebook account, and several other notes in unexpected places. I'm here to help motivate and inspire and inform, but not necessarily to answer every single question anyone on the web has ever had about Squidoo. So if you have a bug or a problem, please continue sending it via our Feedback link. If you have an idea or thought or comment for me, I'm happy to take it at my kimberly@squidoo.com email address, but I can't promise a quick response.  And I flat out can't respond anymore to issues via Facebook or Twitter, unless I say otherwise (for instance, i might do a speedseries of lensmaster Q&A on Twitter one day, something like that).  All of this isn't an effort to be stingy with my time. Instead, it's a way I can focus more on being proactive than reactive, and accessible and helpful for the right people (you) in the right places. Rest assured that I will be reading every thread here on the forum even if I don't comment in them all, and I spend a lot of time reviewing feedback and bugs sent via the official link. I'm here to listen and learn and represent you -- and I hope you'll have fun learning and listening back when I have news and tips and features to share back!

4. Last: Despite how much the public knows about Squidoo, we are still very much a hidden treasure.  Where else can you find step-by-step instructions on how to make jewelry out of Scrabble tiles or learn six ways mushrooms can save the world, or build a web page in six minutes flat with no coding knowledge?  Unlike the winning lottery numbers, keeping lenses a secret is no fun.  My favorite new part of my new focus is going back to being your PR person of sorts.  I'm going to be spending more time surfacing winning lenses, promoting best practices, showcasing new features, and championing for all things good about your efforts through Squidoo. You'll see even more blog posts and newsletters and new lenses and articles about who is doing great things and how to become famous in your own right.

I'm excited about what the SquidU and Squidoo community has created and achieved together, and even more excited to do more fun stuff going forward.  Thanks for being here, everyone!

~Kimberly
YOUR Community & Charity Organizer