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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?

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How should we approach a programming site or sites?

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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.

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General comments (4 comments)
General comments
Lundin‭ wrote almost 4 years ago · edited almost 4 years ago

What worked well on SO was that even though sub-communities emerge with their own chat rooms and tag rules, the moderation rules of the site were pretty much unison. So "power users" following a certain set of tags could moderate a lot of other tags too, when domain knowledge isn't needed. This benefits small niche tags that many don't follow. It's sufficient to have 1-2 active user mods, then they can call in help when needed.

Lundin‭ wrote almost 4 years ago · edited almost 4 years ago

Like when I occasionally did some clean-up at a niche tag, I could do the ground work, then call for backup from the "close vote review chat" by dropping links to questionable posts there. And then suddenly get an army of friendly, competent moderators helping me out, fixing everything in no time. That's pretty awesome but probably only works for really big sites like SO.

Alan‭ wrote almost 4 years ago

How flexible will the platform be in allowing reorganization later? For example, you might start with a general Software site, then one day find that it really needs to split into Embedded Systems and Web Programming and something else? If that kind of flexibility will be possible, then it seems to make sense to start general, then split sites into smaller communities based on demand and need.

ArtOfCode‭ wrote almost 4 years ago

@Alan As long as we can identify which posts need to be copied to the new site, we can do that.