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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?
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?
I'm speaking only for myself here. Unfortunately, we're still kind of winging this, and learning as we go. We now re …
3y ago
It seems that two things are required for a new site to be successful: A core group of domain experts that commit to …
3y ago
I think this answer by @laserkittens to a community proposal is very interesting. It does not just keep track over how m …
3y ago
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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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