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Comments on How should we approach a programming site or sites?
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How should we approach a programming site or sites?
We have a suggestion for a site for professional coding, and software engineering and computer science also have some interest, and there are overlapping suggestions for cloud technologies and single-board microcontrollers. It seems likely that participants here have interests in other related areas too. How shall we approach this cluster of topics? Do we want one big tent -- a single programming site? Do we want a big tent and some specialized spin-offs -- what seems to have happened on SE? Do we want to plan for more focused communities from the start -- and, if so, what would they be?
I was an infrequent participant on SO; I have around 1200 rep after many years of passive, occasional posts. I don't have the right experience there to say with any certainty what worked well and what didn't. It appears to me that SO doesn't really have a community; it's too big for that. It might have sub-communities; I don't know how strong they are and how much they interact. And it might have had a community when it started; they're 11 years in now and things have changed. We'll be starting small; we are not operating at SO scale (yet). An advantage of a single site (or small number of clearly-differentiated sites) is that people know where to go; Balkanization where there are two-dozen different sites depending on which libraries or languages or tools you're using probably does not serve the programming community either.
I think a core diffentiator for Codidact is that we're putting community first from the beginning. We want to do what's best for the people participating here, whether that's one site or a handful or many (or one site and later spin-offs). We also have some tools they don't have over on SE, including categories and integrated blogs or wikis. And we're actively working on an open-source platform, so if it turns out there's something we need and don't have, we don't have to wait 6-8 years for somebody to consider the feature request.
It seems clear to me that there is interest in a place for questions about programming -- code, tools, design, and maybe processes. How shall we address that interest? What shall we build?
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We resolved this by creating Software Development with broad scope. There's even a Code Review category. If the community grows to a size that's hard to manage and subsets want to spin off later, we can do that.
I've had some thoughts about this, which I'll try to coalesce into something resembling an answer. > Codidact is grow …
4y ago
Based on all the feedback here (and also on the related site proposals), I put forth this proposal: Create a single S …
4y ago
I don't know enough to have a full answer, but one differentiation that I think makes sense is for embedded systems prog …
4y ago
I want to offer a more community- and not topic-orientated answer to this question. Basically, you could rephrase the qu …
4y ago
Three problem is that a single supersite is a mess that is difficult to build anything other than a "codidact community" …
4y ago
I don't know about eventually, but while codidact is still getting started, it's better to not splinter communities. …
1y ago
Coming at this from a totally different perspective here. I think all of the above mention many great points but I can't …
4y ago
Lessons learnt from the past I've been at SO pretty much from the start. It is true that SO has sub-communities in a …
4y ago
This is less than a proposal: merely an idea. That's because I've not used SO much and don't know what works and what do …
4y ago
To answer the original question of how to approach programmer sites, I think a number of important features should be co …
4y ago
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I've had some thoughts about this, which I'll try to coalesce into something resembling an answer.
Codidact is growing, but we're still a small project. To help us grow, we're looking to build active, thriving communities. To that end, we're currently only creating sites that have a community already interested.
If you have a community (anywhere from a handful of users up) looking for a site, we can host it for you. Post in this category describing the site you need, tag your post with [proposal] and we'll talk details.
If you don't have a community, but you have suggestions for sites we could create, you can post here using the [idea] tag to gauge if others are interested in helping you build that site. We're not currently creating sites without the support of a group or community, but with luck your [idea] post here will help you find that community — then we can convert your post to a [proposal] and discuss the details.
Thanks!
— The Codidact Team
That's from our posting guidelines in the Site Suggestions category here. I think it's relevant because of that first paragraph - "we're looking to build active, thriving communities".
What will draw people to this project? I think there's only a small handful of answers - dislike of SE, desire to build an open platform - but chief among them has to be people looking for answers to questions (or whatever other content types our communities allow). We have to be able to provide somewhere that can do that, or we don't have a community at all.
Which leads me to my point: I think we'd be better served by starting off with a single combined community. We're small, and we don't have huge numbers of users; splitting an already small number into separate sites for separate technologies leaves us with lots of sites, but not many communities, and little activity. Ghost towns isn't a good look.
So, I'd propose starting with a single site. If we get enough engagement that one type of content starts to overwhelm others, we can look again and create a new site for that technology, copying all its existing posts over. Until that happens, I think the benefits of having activity to show far outstrip any potential losses from simply not being the right kind of activity.
Having said that, I don't think we need one site for absolutely everything. Some topics are distinct enough to not be well-served by an umbrella site. What I'm suggesting here is one umbrella "programming" site; topics like - as aCVn has said - embedded systems, microcontroller design and programming, etc, could do with either being on-topic for Electrical Engineering, or having their own site. From your list:
- professional coding - umbrella site
- software engineering - umbrella site1
- computer science - umbrella site1
- cloud technologies - umbrella site1
- single-board computers - spin-off
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For now. These are probably some of the first topics to spin off when the activity is there. ↩
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