Introducing Stack Overflow for Teams Communities: New Feature Empowers Small Groups to Make Big Changes Across an Organization

Users can now more easily connect, share and leverage collective insights to solve meaningful problems

Stack Overflow announced enhancements to Stack Overflow for Teams Enterprise with the launch of Communities, a new capability to allow users to build, organize, and grow technical groups within their organization based on guilds, communities of practice, and working groups. This new feature allows members of a community to collaboratively learn, share and solve problems in a focused topic or space with others from across their organization focused on similar technologies or problems. Communities empowers members to keep a pulse on activity around a particular area of interest to know what’s trending, who’s a subject matter expert, and discover where there are opportunities to contribute or learn.

Stack Overflow has a long history and strong foundation of enabling technical innovation both in its global, public community and within private organizations ranging from startups to global enterprises. Stack Overflow for Teams already allows colleagues to securely, and privately, capture and share knowledge across an organization with features like focused Q&As, Collections, and long-form Articles. However, sometimes, an entire Teams instance feels too broad for individuals and departments who want to connect around a specific topic — Communities closes that gap. A smaller grouping of people centered around common interests gives members a reason to return to Teams regularly to engage with the knowledge, and to learn and network with peers and coworkers across the organization.

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This feature represents Stack Overflow’s focus on the developer workflow, which will evolve significantly in the coming months as the company invests in generative AI. Customers taking advantage of Communities on Stack Overflow for Teams, can create central spaces for users with shared interests in order to:

• Self-organize into communities of practice: creating central spaces for open, self-organizing groups to share more types of valuable resources, collaborate in new ways, better recognize expertise and impact, and further incentivize contribution.
• Discover and share valuable relevant resources: creating opportunity to share experiential knowledge through hands-on problem solving to yield deeper understanding than reading documentation alone.
• Grow knowledge and expertise: shortening the learning time for employees by giving direct access to mentors and knowledge stewards, reducing duplication of efforts, and solving problems faster and more efficiently, leading to more productive organizations.
• Break down knowledge silos: enabling users who may not normally interact or collaborate to more easily connect, share and leverage collective knowledge and expertise, and work together to solve meaningful problems.

“Empowering employees to come together and engage on a common technology space, problem set or area of a tech stack has become even more important in this age of the distributed, hybrid and remote workforce,” said Vasudha Swaminathan, Senior Director of Product, Stack Overflow for Teams. “We know that people contribute and participate more when they feel a sense of belonging and responsibility to a community. Technology organizations have long had communities of practice, guilds and working groups, both formal and informal, and Communities finally gives them a home to learn, share and grow together. We are excited to see how our users take advantage of this feature and the impact and value created for their organizations, both now and as we continue to roll out more updates.”

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