A deep dive into how we designed Collectives

Last month, we announced the launch of CollectivesTM, places within Stack Overflow that are a little bit more concentrated, a little bit more specialized. They’re mini communities around certain programming languages, products, or services in Stack Overflow where developers can engage directly with the companies and individuals who know the technology best. Each Collective is smaller than a full exchange, larger than a single tag, and an easier way of narrowing down all of the content on Stack Overflow when working with specific tech. 

We’re excited that this product is finally live in front of our community of users, and we wanted to take a deep dive into how we designed Collectives, starting from the initial ideation to all the decisions and considerations that led to what it is today. This should give you some insight into how we thought about the product and its use. For a look at how our engineers built Collectives as part of the existing public Stack Overflow codebase, check out their deep dive coming next week. 

Collectives was an idea that had been kicking around for a while. For years, we had seen individuals share knowledge about technical products freely. Some companies even provided unofficial (or official) tech support by answering questions on their products. We had explored the idea of providing a home page for a technology or company within Stack Overflow, but never figured out a good implementation of it. 

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