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Comments on What criteria are used to determine to launch a new community?

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What criteria are used to determine to launch a new community?

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Codidact currently has several communities (with varying levels of activity), and several more proposals for new communities. There seems to be an effort in many of these proposals to collect users to ensure that there's enough interest before launching a new site. This makes sense, because an empty site without participants (especially expert answerers) isn't particularly helpful to anyone.

But how much interest is "enough" interest? Are there some objective (or even subjective) criteria that need to be met in terms of number of "signed-up" users, number of moderators, how many upvotes the proposal gets, or scope definition completeness before a site is launched?

Or in short, what's the process from proposal to actual launch look like in terms of how the decision to launch gets made?

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General comments (1 comment)
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I'm speaking only for myself here.

Unfortunately, we're still kind of winging this, and learning as we go. We now realize we launched some early communities without enough active, engaged members, but we don't know where that sweet spot is yet. We don't want to hinder communities, and we also don't want to set them up for failure. Early on we were paying too much attention to votes on proposals, without asking whether those votes meant "I'm interested" or "that sounds like a good idea". This is why I started adding the posts asking people to indicate their interest.

One thing that I've come to realize makes a difference is velocity. Our Judaism community gathered support quickly and launched within days, which meant the community could continue that momentum. The proposers of our Electrical Engineering community came to us as a group of interested experts and, similarly, we launched within days. Early on I thought the RPG community would take off, but it's been waiting for a while without much activity and I don't know if the original supporters are still interested. We have a new proposal for Christianity and a recently-revitalized one for Code Golf, both of which also seem to have active supporters. (Christianity only has a couple who've said they're enthusiastic; I'd feel more comfortable with more.) With the momentum that Code Golf has, I'd be happy to launch it soon -- we're actually blocked on a technical matter, not the community (aside from the matter of a name).

We've been launching communities with "enough 'starter' scope" with the assumption that communities would then refine that scope as questions come up. On Software Development we've gotten some pushback that we were too vague to start. That might be due to the unusual way this community got created, though.

I am very interested in hearing feedback on how to do this better! We want to help communities build homes for themselves here. Some will do it more quickly and some more slowly, some with broader scope (encouraging more questions) and some with narrower scope (more specialized). If the community isn't there (or doesn't stick around because there's not enough activity), we aren't serving them well. If we place too many hurdles before launching communities, we aren't serving them well. We're aiming for balance, learning from each community we launch, and doing some guessing. I'm sorry; I wish I had a better answer.

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General comments (8 comments)
General comments
Lundin‭ wrote about 4 years ago

I think it will be misguiding to count the number of casually interested. Those might not end up very active, lose interest or just end up as passive "readers". Maybe we should ask how many that are willing to act as moderators or consider themselves domain experts (or at least professional). That gives a good idea for how large the group of core users might be initially. As for a number... well at least 10 such users as a bare minimum? We need to stop launching ghost towns.

Mithrandir24601‭ wrote about 4 years ago

@Lundin There's another side of what you're writing here - it's just the way of things online that there will be more casual readers than heavily active participants and we still need to think of them. Asking for 10 people who are willing to be mods is too much, I think. We don't require sites to be highly active and even if we did, 10 is a lot - most sites don't even need half that. It's also not necessarily the best thing to ask until the site exists

Lundin‭ wrote about 4 years ago · edited about 4 years ago

@Mithrandir24601‭ I said mods or domain expert/professional. Like if you launch the Cooking site, you might want at least 10 people who are either willing to do moderator work, or work professionally in the restaurant business or has cooking as a major hobby/passion. Not 4-5 people who say "yeah I cook food for dinner so I'm interested". And then I'm counting on half of those 10 who claimed to be interested dropping out for various reasons.

Lundin‭ wrote about 4 years ago · edited about 4 years ago

As things stand, we have some ~3-4 "ghost towns" and also several sites struggling with participation. The ghost towns in particular should probably not have been launched. It looks bad on the network as whole if you have lots of dead communities.

Peter Cooper Jr.‭ wrote about 4 years ago

As someone who really wants an RPG community, I agree that we don't yet have enough people to take off. For any community, we don't just need "participants", we need "answerers" and other people willing to write high-quality content regularly. It's a big commitment, really. For many communities here I browse them occasionally but don't feel qualified to give good answers (and probably wouldn't have the time to do so a lot even if I were qualified).

mbomb007‭ wrote about 4 years ago

If you consider Area 51 of SE, they had metrics for communities to see X users, Y questions, Z answers. Maybe we need something like that.

Peter Cooper Jr.‭ wrote about 4 years ago

I also think we could do some standardization of wanting some "good example questions" ahead of time (like Area51.SE required), and probably even some "off-topic example questions"

Peter Cooper Jr.‭ wrote almost 4 years ago

It may also be helpful to describe just what exactly someone is "signing up" to support if they agree to participate. Is that promising to visit the site some number of times daily/weekly/etc. for some number of weeks/months/years and vote on what they see? Is that promising to write some number of questions or answers within some time period? Not everything needs to be strictly quantified, but two people might say "I'd like to participate," yet have very different ideas of what that might mean.