Our network now has eight sites (plus Meta), and we hope to see many more as we continue to develop both our platform and our communities. As we've worked with communities to build the sites we have now, we've found ourselves adjusting how we go about deciding when a site is ready. We are trying to strike a good balance between being responsive and getting out of the way when a community is ready to proceed, on the one hand, and not jumping the gun and creating sites before people are ready to use them, on the other. When people come to a site that we've announced, they want to see some activity already. It's a chicken-and-egg problem, and we're trying to solve it by having some people ready to create that initial activity.

For a while we've judged this by voting and activity on the proposal and some amount of "gut feeling". This works for proposals that take off quickly, like Electrical Engineering and Judaism did, but it might not be serving the longer-running proposals as well. Two months ago I was guessing we'd be creating the Tabletop Role-Playing Games site soon and, yet, we haven't. I can't tell if we don't have the interested users or if people indicated their interest by voting on the proposal and are patiently waiting for us to set it up.

The challenge is that a vote on the proposal can mean a few different things. It can mean "this sounds like a viable site". It can mean "I'm passively interested; I would read that". It can mean "I am eager to build this and would participate heavily". We just don't know.

This is why I've begun to add the following answer to proposals:

Right now we don't have a good way of identifying people who would help build a new community, so let's do this: if you are interested in helping to build this site, please leave a comment describing your level of interest (casual visitor, enthusiast, expert in this topic within the site's scope, something else?). I'll edit them into the post later.

We don't want to create a heavyweight process or a system of quotas. We do not need to see commitments from 200+ people before we'll create a site. (If we did, we wouldn't have any of our current sites.) But we'd like to know that a few propsective contributors are out there alongside the readers and browsers. We're asking for the feedback publicly, in comments, so the builders will know who each other are, and so they can clue us in about things we wouldn't know on our own. For example, EE came to us with a small group of experts; knowing that about the founders helped us move quickly. Sometimes it's more about who than how many.

We have several suggestions that look viable but we can't tell if people are interested in building them. In some cases the suggestions are not very developed yet but they gained a positive response. Please help refine them where you can and weigh in where you are interested:

• Tabletop Role Playing Games
• Mathematics
• Single Board Microcontrollers
• History
• Medical Science

There are several more suggestions in the Site Proposals category. If you see something there that you can contribute to, please do.

If you've been following site proposals, you might be wondering why this list doesn't include two proposals with a lot of support:

• We have, just today, launched Languages and Linguistics -- it's brand new and empty right now, so if you've been waiting for it, please go forth and ask and answer.

• We plan to launch Software Development soon. Software Development will be both a site and an incubator; we are planning from the beginning that some sites might spin off from it later. We also want to work out how best to collaborate with our friends at TopAnswers, who have several language-specific sites.

posted over 3 years ago

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3y ago

Monica Cellio‭ staff

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