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Comments on Is it possible to merge Power Users and Linux Systems? Would Codidact benefit from it?
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Is it possible to merge Power Users and Linux Systems? Would Codidact benefit from it?
One of the concerns of How can we grow this community posts (see on Power Users and on Linux Systems) is that the sites may not be active enough, resulting in a poor first impression.
If my calculations are correct, LS gets an average of 2 questions per week and PU gets 5.
Given the scope of LS is (arguably?) a subset of PU and that both communities are still small, wouldn't Codidact benefit from merging the two sites — assuming it is doable — at least for the time being?
Adding Linux (or Unix, Macos, etc.) tags where appropriate would not be complicated.
Are there drawbacks or other advantages I overlooked in merging? Any opinion is appreciated.
Per-community Meta surveys about this:
- Power Users: How would you feel about a merger with linux systems?
- Linux Systems: Should we merge with Power Users?
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The surveys Q&As have been live for a week and while the number of answers and votes is relatively low to say much with statistical certainty it seems as if Powerusers wouldn't have much of a problem with it but Linux System users might. Especially they might fear to lose a sense of community if merged; some of their users might only be interested in seeing and discussing Linux questions and it's unclear how and if they could continue doing this.
It also seems to be consensus that both communities must agree to a merger; if only one disagrees there cannot be one.
The next steps in the next days would be to basically answer the questions raised in the survey Q&As and come up with a detailed merger proposal that explains how the merger is supposed to happen including proposed name/scope/categories of the merged sites. Maybe there could be a single person or a group of persons (maybe one from each participating site like Quasímodo and samcarter) that could create this merge proposal and introduce it. Maybe this specific merge proposal could then be discussed again on both sides. Finally, there might be a vote on the detailed merge proposal from both sides with both of them requiring approval for a merge to happen (I wonder if there should be a minimal quorum of active participants or just the relative majority to pass the proposal).
This is pretty general, but I think we are here currently in the step where details of a potential merger must be proposed like the name and where to sort in Linux questions. Without this, the merger cannot go forward. And because we seem to want mergers to be community driven, such proposals should basically come from the affected communities themselves.
That's just as a summary of what has happened so far and what should happen next.
Would Codadict benefit from it?
Maybe we can define a metric (active users, positively received asked questions per week, ...) that define the health of a community and then we could compare the health of both communities before the merger with the health of the combined community after a merger. More specifically we could even ask (in case the merger takes place) specifically how Linux questions are faring in a combined community and, who knows, split up again if there is a problem. However, given the low numbers of activity, we should be aware that the error margins in all these metrics would be relatively large. It could very well be that we never know for sure if Codidact would have benefited more from a merge or from not merging.
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