Communities

Writing
Writing
Codidact Meta
Codidact Meta
The Great Outdoors
The Great Outdoors
Photography & Video
Photography & Video
Scientific Speculation
Scientific Speculation
Cooking
Cooking
Electrical Engineering
Electrical Engineering
Judaism
Judaism
Languages & Linguistics
Languages & Linguistics
Software Development
Software Development
Mathematics
Mathematics
Christianity
Christianity
Code Golf
Code Golf
Music
Music
Physics
Physics
Linux Systems
Linux Systems
Power Users
Power Users
Tabletop RPGs
Tabletop RPGs
Community Proposals
Community Proposals
tag:snake search within a tag
answers:0 unanswered questions
user:xxxx search by author id
score:0.5 posts with 0.5+ score
"snake oil" exact phrase
votes:4 posts with 4+ votes
created:<1w created < 1 week ago
post_type:xxxx type of post
Search help
Notifications
Mark all as read See all your notifications »
Q&A

Welcome to Codidact Meta!

Codidact Meta is the meta-discussion site for the Codidact community network and the Codidact software. Whether you have bug reports or feature requests, support questions or rule discussions that touch the whole network – this is the site for you.

Comments on How should we approach a programming site or sites?

Parent

How should we approach a programming site or sites?

+25
−0

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?

--

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.

History
Why does this post require attention from curators or moderators?
You might want to add some details to your flag.
Why should this post be closed?

1 comment thread

General comments (4 comments)
Post
+12
−0

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
  1. For now. These are probably some of the first topics to spin off when the activity is there. ↩

History
Why does this post require attention from curators or moderators?
You might want to add some details to your flag.

1 comment thread

General comments (5 comments)
General comments
Peter Cooper Jr.‭ wrote over 4 years ago

I think one "site" for "programmers" or "software engineers" (whichever term one prefers) makes sense, as that's largely the "professional identity" that I (and probably others) would identify with. I also wonder if thinking of organizational structure options being only "site", "category", and "tag" is some sort of false trichotomy though, and there are ways of encouraging and handling specialist communities/groups that form around a language or platform somehow within the larger "site".

Alan‭ wrote over 4 years ago · edited over 4 years ago

Personally, I would not distinguish between 'professional programmers' and everyone else. There are a lot of people out there who write software who are every bit as good at programming as the 'professionals', and have exactly the same kinds of technical questions and answers... and might well make better 'community' members.

dmckee‭ wrote over 4 years ago

I'm with @Alan on the matter of naming: the name should not exclude a desired audience segment. So if we want all skilled and aspiring programmers then the name should not suggest we only want pros. I'm thinking of the SE site "Theoretical physics". The founders insisted that they were creating a site for all graduate and higher level physics questions, but wouldn't change the exclusionary name. The site died due to insufficient traffic. I wonder who else didn't visit.

Lundin‭ wrote over 4 years ago · edited over 4 years ago

The main/only purpose with "Professional programmers" or similar names is that it does exclude the flood of crappy, uninteresting homework questions. That's a MASSIVE benefit. By all means have sites dedicated to learning programming, but don't try to make teachers out of domain experts unwilling to spoon feed children all day long, like SO/SE did.

Monica Cellio‭ wrote over 4 years ago

I agree about exclusionary naming. I think we can address the very real concern raised by @Lundin with clear messaging both in the Q&A category description (the line you see at the top of the page) and in the guidance on the "ask" page, which can be customized per-site. These are tools that weren't available on SE (maybe the latter is now, I hear?), so the approach hasn't really been tried yet.