Post History

Based on all the feedback here (and also on the related site proposals), I put forth this proposal:

Create a single Software Development site, *planning from the start for spinoffs*.  Here's how I see that working:

First, I said "software development", not "programming", because we're not an SO clone and don't need to do exactly what they did (as pointed out here).  I'm proposing a broad scope -- code questions, software design, architecture, process, tools, the works.  *In time* that will get large and subcommunities with more-specific interests (like web development or C++ or machine learning) might feel lost in the larger community.  That's an issue at SO, and "afterthought" specialized sites face challenges because their topics are also *still on-topic on SO*.  We need a better strategy for subcommunities that want to get a place of their own.  But id doesn't seem like there's a lot of interest in creating a bunch of small, specialized sites from the beginning and running the risk of falling below critical mass.

If the emerging subcommunity is forming around specific tags, that's relatively tractable, especially with tag hierarchies.  Some here have suggested dividing up programming sites by languages or tech stacks; those would have tagging that's clear in 95% of the cases.  (A question asking about differences between included-language-A and excluded-language-B would be an exception.)  In this tags-based approach, the community would put together a spinoff proposal that lists the tags to move, and if there's consensus we could proceed.

We could then create a (temporary) category for the proto-site in which to collect the candidate emigrees, so people could sanity-check the questions that would be moving there.  This allows some tuning -- we could start by moving everything with tags X, Y, and Z there, but when people say "no that particular question belongs on the original site", we could move it back. When the community is happy, we could then pick up that category and move it to a new site.  While it's all getting sorted out, those questions are still on the general site and findable by search there, so this isn't too disruptive.  (The last thing we want is to be bouncing questions back and forth *between different sites* while sorting this out.)

This approach lets us start with one general site while supporting specialized communities *as they emerge*.  I don't think any of us can accurately say what specialized programming communities will exist in a year, so let's focus on a framework that lets them develop naturally while also having a home for the many other questions that aren't specific to a tech stack or language.