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.
Experiment: indicating interest and expertise
A healthy community requires both activity and people. The Incubator Q&A category is the place to build activity (and Meta is the place to flesh out issues that come up in doing so), but we'd also like to have a way to gauge interest. What replaces the "I'm interested" entries from the old system?
As an experiment, we've added the following three reaction types for proposal descriptions:
-
Active user: I will participate actively in this community, both here in the incubator and after launch.
-
Casual browser: I will browse activity in this community and participate occasionally, both here in the incubator and after launch.
-
Subject matter expert: I have expertise in topics covered by this site.
What's "active"? This is somewhat subjective, but, broadly speaking, we'd expect active users of a community to visit more days than not, look for questions to answer, and ask questions. Obviously this depends on other people -- there need to be questions to answer -- but these first two are about intentions. Do you expect to visit and participate most days? That's active. Are you interested enough that you'll keep coming back and looking around, but less frequently? That's casual browsing.
The last one is a different dimension. Having at least a few experts can make a big difference in helping a community to grow, particularly if they're also active. If you consider yourself to have expertise in some aspect of the proposed community, please let us know.
As I said, these reactions are an experiment. If we need to tweak them or add more, we can do that. Please try it out and let us know if you have ideas for improvements. If, over time, you find your feelings changing, no worries -- you can retract or change your reactions at any time.
1 answer
This is cool, I'm curious to see how the experiment will turn out!
I've thought about bringing up this kind of thing before. It's neat that the CD team had the same idea, and even developed it more! :) I ended up not posting it because I had some doubts.
Given that reacting to a post is a very low effort action, I think it's inevitable that it will overestimate how much activity there would be if the site is created. For example, some people who are interested may have indicated interest a year ago, and stopped browsing the site 6 months ago.
Since we have the Incubator, I think that's a much better gauge of real interest. It's also more direct, since interest is expressed by actually creating realistic content rather than merely promising to do so.
But now that I think about it, I can see how one might find it less exciting to post in the incubator rather than a full site, since the latter implies a better visibility and more focused userbase. So the incubator is not perfect either, it is more of an underestimate.
So we will now have one indicator that is optimistic (the reactions) and one that is pessimistic (the incubator posts) - that actually sounds pretty good for trying to gauge true interest!
1 comment thread