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How to propose a community on the codidact.com network

Our network of communities is growing but is still small. If the community you're looking for isn't here, you can propose adding it.

To help us grow, we're looking to build active, thriving communities that start with a group of people who are already interested in building it. We don't require a lot of people and there's no hard-and-fast rule; we're looking for enough activity to help your new community succeed.

Starting a proposal

To get started, post a proposal in the Descriptions category. This description is Wiki so that it can be edited easily by your fellow community members. You can use this template as a starting point.

A good proposal addresses the following topics:

• Name and high-level description. What's the one-sentence description of what your community is about? If you were filling out the tag line on the list of communities, what might you put there?

• A little more about scope. Please give us an idea of what topics are and are not included in your proposed community. This is a starting point; we expect proposals to be refined over time.

• Address any overlap with pre-existing communities. If your proposed community is about a topic that overlaps with others already on our network, how should that be handled? It's ok for communities to have overlapping scope, but if it's a large overlap we'll need to discuss that more, involving the other community. If you've already had some of those discussions, please include that.

• Where/who is your community now? Are you a group of active users from another online community, are you colleagues working in the same research area, are you members of a mailing list that wants more out of life?

• Additional features. If you have initial ideas about how you'll use Codidact's features beyond Q&A, please include them. For example, if building a set of canonical reference material (like a wiki) or hosting a shared blog or supporting critiques or reviews is important, please let us know.

If you have a community already (anywhere from a handful of people up), invite them to join Codidact if they haven't already and participate in the proposal. If you don't have a group of interested people yet, your proposal might attract some from the existing Codidact community. We're not currently creating sites without the support of a group or community, but with luck your post here will help you find that community.

Developing the proposal, or what's this "incubator"?

A description is important but a body of questions is even better. Use the Incubator Q&A category to ask and answer real questions that you would post on the community you want to build. We think real questions and answers will help flesh out scope, ideas about what's answerable or not, and so on. (Plus, you have a place to ask questions even before launch.)

Use Meta the way you would on your community: raise issues related to your proposal, scope, special features or configuration, specific questions and answers in the incubator, attracting more community members... anything that will help you build a strong community.

Because the incubator and meta will have questions related to any active proposal, of which there will likely be several concurrently, all posts -- description, incubator Q&A, and meta posts -- must use a special tag to identify the proposal, in addition to any other appropriate tags. When you create your proposal we'll create a special tag for this purpose that has different styling from other tags.

The purpose of the incubator is to develop real Q&A by actual participants in the target community. Questions that are instead wholesale copies of questions from other sites will be closed and most likely deleted, especially if it looks like plagiarism. We don't want to collect questions that somebody on another site once asked; we want to collect "live" questions that people here care about. That doesn't mean you can't bring a question here that you've asked somewhere else, but we're looking for a new question that someone currently cares about and that takes into account what you've already learned. Let the incubator Q&A develop organically; it's ok if that takes some time.

Things that are different on this proposals site

Proposal descriptions are wikis to make collaboration easier. They can't be voted on -- the strength of a proposal comes from its description and associated Q&A, not from the number of people who clicked a voting button once. We're looking for proto-communities with activity -- people asking, answering, and editing posts in the topic area of interest.

Posts in the other categories can be voted on, and voting is important signal as a community develops. Because this is an incubator and not the final site, however, there's no reputation, positive or negative, for these votes.

To make it easier for people to work together to build new communities, we've set the ability boundaries low here. Most people should be able to perform most actions, if not immediately then very early.

What happens when a community is ready to launch?

When there is consensus that a proposal is solid, we'll create the community and also:

• Move incubator Q&A with that topic tag to the new community and create redirects from the incubator. The community starts with its existing material; nothing from the early days in the incubator is lost. (If an incubator question fits more than one proposal, that'll be sorted out on Meta first.) If there are Meta posts that should move too, we'll do that.

• Create user profiles on the new community for everybody the previous bullet touches, so we won't have any problems with attribution, null users, traceability, etc.

• Fix up the tags, dropping the special proposal tag and setting up Meta in the usual way.

What happens if a proposal isn't viable?

We understand that sometimes what seems like a good idea just isn't working for some reason, and we encourage everyone to use meta to discuss issues if that happens. Proposals can be closed by consensus. If that happens, we'll archive the Q&A so that if someone wants to revive the proposal again in the future, nothing is lost.