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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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It seems that two things are required for a new site to be successful:

  1. A core group of domain experts that commit to being around to answer questions, and initially, to do the housekeeping.
  2. Getting the word out. Somehow those people with questions need to know to ask here.

I think 3 committed domain experts is enough for launching a site. That's the relatively easy criterion to meet. The experts in any domain are well known, so you simply reach out to them and invite them. Some will already be somewhere else, aren't comfortable with the whole concept, or just don't want to take on an additional commitment. You keep going until you get at least three.

Note that this reaching out doesn't have to be done by a domain expert. Either way, the result is well measurable. Either there are 3 people that have said they'll be around to answer questions and provide content, or there aren't. Don't launch until there are.

Getting the word out is much more difficult. I don't have ready answers how to do it, nor how to measure whether it is likely to get done. Getting the word out can't be properly done until there is a site, so the decision to launch has to be made on whether there is a believable plan.

I don't have a good answer to what constitutes a believable plan. For now, we probably need the core group of site proposers to present a plan, then we'll wing it on whether it sounds good enough or not. This will likely include some back and forth negotiation. In the long run, we will hopefully learn what works and what doesn't.

It would also be instructive to look at the two issues above in retrospect for each site, together with some evaluation of how well the sites have taken off. I think some patterns will be apparent.

Not counting Meta, we have run 10 different experiments already. It's time to gather the data and see what it tells us.

Real data, 30 Oct 2020

To get at least some measure of how successful each site currently is, I looked at the non-meta activity in the last month. I counted all the post in a category where the system showed the last activity being less than "1 month ago". I then added up the result for all non-meta catagories for each site:

Software Development       79, 6      85
Judaism                    27, 5, 9   41
Electrical Enginnering     25, 1      26
Languages                  15, 3      18
Math                       14         14
Cooking                    5, 2, 2     9
Outdoors                   4, 1, 1     6
Photography                2, 1, 1     4
Writing                    3, 0        3
Scientific Speculation     1, 0        1

The first sets of numbers are the number of posts within each individual category. The last number is the total of the others. I used that total to make a quick visual representation of relative site activity:

SW   XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
Jud  XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
EE   XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
Lang XXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
Math XXXXXXXXXXXX
Cook XXXXXXX
OutD XXXXX
Phot XXX
Writ XX
ScSp X

So what does this tell us?

  1. There is no clear cutoff between active and dead sites. We seem to have a continuum.
  2. The more recently launched sites are generally doing OK.
  3. The bottom four (maybe 5) sites have in common that there is no group of domain experts committed to the site.
  4. The top four (maybe 5) sites have in common that there is a group of domain experts committed to the site.
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General comments (5 comments)
General comments
Mithrandir24601‭ wrote about 4 years ago · edited about 4 years ago

In terms of data, it appears that sites which mass-imported from SE aren't doing as well as those that didn't. One site (Judaism) imported a few questions from SE and is doing very well, as far as I can tell. Might be more useful to give some hard numbers though

Olin Lathrop‭ wrote about 4 years ago · edited about 4 years ago

@Mith: Yes, of the sites I regularly check, it seems like Photography and Scientific Speculation are dead, and Outdoors is nearly dead. Of those, Outdoors and Speculation did lots of importing, and Photography was abandoned by the original proponents.

Olin Lathrop‭ wrote about 4 years ago · edited about 4 years ago

@Mith: To get Electrical Engineering going, I grabbed a few of my own popular answers from SE, but they weren't just imported. I edited and cleaned up each one individually. I also only grabbed a small number, under a dozen. That seems to have worked.

Lundin‭ wrote about 4 years ago

Both EE and Judaism had lots of veteran users and mods from SE coming over and that's simply the main reasons why those two communities seem to do OK. This is exactly why I insist that we should look for how many such core users a community can count on before launching. We can argue about the exact number. But casually interested people won't carry any new community, there needs to be a core group.

Zerotime‭ wrote about 4 years ago

Nice work on collecting the data!