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.
When is there consensus that a proposal is solid?
From Community Proposals:
When there is consensus that a proposal is solid, we'll create the community
When? What are the criteria for a consensus? What are the criteria for solidness?
2 answers
Most proposals here were just made by 1 single inactive person who had no intention to push the proposal further at all, they just liked to propose something and then log off. Well... thanks, off you go then...
The second-most common proposal is the one with 1 single active person, who are doing the necessary work but need similar users to back them up. Usually they give up after a while and then the proposal ends up in the freezer.
So I think the minimum criteria needs to be that there is a handful of active domain experts who can push the site forward. People who can finish setting the site scope, who can post a lot of Q&A to get the site going, and who are also potential moderator material. Without those the site will quickly die off. Some rough metric would be ~5 active domain experts where some of them can also be the first moderators.
Adding casual users on top of that is less of a problem - personally I've been casually active on lots of communities just to help with activity, even if I'm not really interested in that community myself. Anyone can ask questions, if nothing else.
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It's a judgement call, but a collaborative one.
A few months ago I suggested advancing two proposals (Worldbuilding and Home Improvement). This was done in consultation with the rest of the team, but we then brought the idea here to refine. In both cases there are some decisions that need to be made, and I was hoping to see more community involvement there. I started to write some more here, but I now realize I should update those posts instead.
How did we get to those two specific candidates? I reviewed the proposal tags on this community, looking first at the ones with the most activity. The top tag at the time was Webmasters, but there's been very little recent activity and it's not clear if the people interested in the community are still here. That led me to post Checking in on Webmasters. The next tag was Video Games, but almost all of the activity is from one person who later stopped participating here. Worldbuilding and Home Improvement were the next two, so we looked more closely at them. There was a bit of a drop-off after these ones.
Number of posts is a starting point but not enough by itself. After identifying these four proposals we looked at the activity -- voting, number of participants, scope, questions being open and seeming to be answerable, activity over time, etc. We saw two proposals that seem to be ready to advance, so I asked for feedback. Maybe we haven't made it clear enough, but anybody is welcome to start meta discussions about advancing (or refining) any proposal. If we've missed something, please point it out! We want to work together to launch the communities that people want to build and sustain.
(Since making those posts a few months ago, I've been personally excited to see Puzzling developing here. I'd like to see more people participating; right now there are a handful of us, so if any one person had an attack of life, that would affect the community significantly. This happened with some of our earliest communities, and we're trying to learn from that.)
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