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What are the steps between community idea and community proposal?
Inspired from this post asking what steps there are between proposal and launching a community, I would like to know what steps there are between an idea and a proposal.
Right now, we have at least one community idea with a relatively high upvote count: Factual History (even higher than Cooking and this community has already been launched).
Unfortunately, nothing has happened there since over a month. Maybe the proposer didn't know how to proceed or how to gauge when the time is right to go from idea to proposal, or in this regard how this is done.
- When is an idea ready to be a proposal?
- What are possible values (upvote count, Wilson score, total votes, etc.) to determine an idea is ready?
- How to gauge interested users? (Are votes even comparable to users interested in participating? May we in need of an additional button or metric to show that one's interested in participating?)
- How to proceed? Swap the tag from idea to proposal? Open up a new proposal?
2 answers
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An [idea] is for when you have an idea for a site but you don't have the community to go with it. The hope is that by posting it here, you find like-minded folks who will help you build the site.
A [proposal] is for ideas that do already have a community, or for [idea]s that have successfully found one.
I hadn't looked at the History proposal for a while, but now that I do I see two or three engaged users, and that's a little while ago now. Two or three isn't enough to get a site started - there's no set threshold, but it needs enough users to keep it going even if a bunch of them are off doing other things for a while. For communities like Cooking, that might be 10 people - everyone can participate in a cooking site. For something more niche or something that requires expertise, the number will be higher because not so many people can immediately jump in and start contributing.
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One thing that's hard for us to gauge, and is important for a new community to get off the ground, is level of interest. People might upvote a proposal out of interest ("I'd read that") or because they think it's a good idea in the abstract ("a site like that should exist") or because they want to actively participate ("yes! ready to dive in!"). So while there are no hard-and-fast rules about the makeup of the prospective community, we want to be able to see that there is one.
I've just gone through the list and added this answer to several of them:
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'll need to do something better in the future, but for now, please weigh in (and ask people you're recruiting to weigh in) by leaving comments like those, so we aren't relying as much on team members' personal impressions and memories of who expressed what level of interest and so on.
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