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.
Are you here to participate in a specific proposal? Click on the proposal tag (with the dark outline) to see only posts about that proposal and not all of the others that are in progress. Tags are at the bottom of each post.
Does the Invasive Species proposal have support?
Invasive Species was proposed almost a year ago but has no incubator posts. The proposal includes outlines (titles) of sample questions that would be on-topic, but they haven't been developed into full questions yet. Comments question whether this proposal is too specific to support a community, but it's also one of the more fully-developed descriptions we have. Being niche isn't a reason to reject a proposal, but a proposal can't advance without activity.
Are people still interested in this proposal? If so, would interested people develop those sample questions from the proposal -- or other questions -- into full questions in the incubator? Are there blockers that need to be sorted out first?
2 answers
Sharing information about invasive species is an important issue. I started my town's Invasive Species Committee, and have seen some of these challenges first hand. Lots of people are doing their own thing, with much duplicated learning and discovery out there.
I was hoping to get a site going to address the problem. However, I couldn't get anyone on our own committee very interested in it. It seems most people aren't used to computer forums, and even less Q&A sites.
If we (our town committee) had started using this site, I think we would have been able to get other committees involved too, and it would have spread.
I thought trying to get the site going by spreading the word otherwise beyond our committee was just too hard. I could have mentioned it at a few conferences, but think about how you would explain to someone who doesn't know anything about Codidact how to post a question:
Go to this URL, read the site description, then go to the Q&A category and post a question, but you first have to apply this special "tag" thing, and your post will be in the same pile as questions about how many angels can dance on the head of a pin, what a 13th level troll eats for breakfast, what would happen if the sun magically vanished, etc. You have to use this "filter" thing...
That ain't gonna work.
Basically, our incubator system is broken. It makes it nearly impossible to point outside people to a new proposed site and have them use it without a large amount of Codidact knowledge. Effectively, our proposed sites can only grow from within, so any specialized "new" topic that people aren't already here for is never going to work.
After our own committee showed little interest when I described the site, I gave up. It was hard to explain, and I couldn't easily show them. Until our incubator system is fixed so that I can hand out just a URL at conferences and the like, I'm not going to pursue this.
I am not particularly interested in the topic itself, but I would like to make a suggestion: Maybe the topic can be integrated/extended into a "Biology" community?
The proposal could be kept as a definition of a certain subset or topic thereof.
Open is of course, if this would make things better in terms of activity.
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