Welcome to the staging ground for new communities! Each proposal has a description in the "Descriptions" category and a body of questions and answers in "Incubator Q&A". You can ask questions (and get answers, we hope!) right away, and start new proposals.
How to tell that a proposal is ready for launch?
Previously in the old system, we asked around of how many that were willing to participate, posted scope proposals and declared interested with comments or voting.
Now:
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The "Descriptions" tab/category doesn't seem to invite any discussion. There's just a question and not really clear who should be editing it. Is it to be regarded as community wiki? Should anyone edit it after consensus in the various discussions below the meta tab?
We can reply with comments but not answers, so it would seem that it invites to some limited discussion still. Which probably belongs under the various meta posts instead...?
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The Q&A under Incubator Q&A tab/category is supposedly featuring typical examples of on-topic questions. Are we to answer these as we would answer any question on the launched sites?
If not then how do we tell if a proposal is popular/active/mature enough to get launched? We could perhaps use Q&A activity as an indicator of this, but do the users understand that if they want a certain proposal launched, the only way of doing so now is to be active under Q&A?
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If we are using Incubator Q&A "as if on the real site", then we have the problem with scope not yet fully fleshed out and such questions might become borderline on-topic. Essentially each question might need its own meta discussion. And if users start to ask "real" questions rather than "canonical examples", then the question quality isn't likely going to be as good or representative.
I realize that some "hard metric" like a certain number of votes, a certain number of users declaring interest isn't necessarily helpful since these "age" over time. But interested users do at least need to know what they are supposed to be doing in case they are interested in having a certain proposal launched.
1 answer
Incubator Q&A is meant to be the same as it would be on the launched site -- ask real questions, write real answers, discuss scope questions on Meta. When a community launches, it will take its incubated Q&A with it -- so that should be real, not proxies.
One of the effects of trying out a proposal like this is that yes, scope boundaries might change and some questions might get closed. That's ok -- it's important to have the negative tests too, not just the positive tests. (Those can be left behind at launch if the community prefers.) Everything, including the Meta questions, shares the proposal-specific tag, to make it easy to see everything together.
Proposals are wikis because we want people who are interested in a proposal to be able to work together easily to refine it. Comments and Meta are tools to ask questions and work out disagreements.
We don't have solid metrics for "enough activity" or "enough people"; we're feeling this out together with our proto-communities. We have a fix coming that will allow us to add an "I will participate" reaction on the proposals, but showing is better than telling: a stable community has enough positively-received questions and enough people asking and answering them that it can stand on its own even if the most active member or two step back.
This approach is new and we're all learning together. What we were doing before wasn't working; we think this will work better, and we'd like everyone's help in refining it as we go.
We'll look again at the on-site guidance we're giving (help, category descriptions, etc) to try to make this more clear. Suggestions are welcome!
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