How can I help this proposal get beyond the commitment phase?

Question

Proposal: Synthetic Biology

Although this proposal is making good progress garnering the numbers of committed users needed to make it to private beta, it is still lagging behind in terms of committers with 200+ rep on any other site. As the overall score is the minimum of the three metrics used to measure progress, this is something that needs to be rectified for the site to get to private beta.

If I am a user that has committed to the site, but want to do more to help, how can I help the site to get out of the commitment phase?

Answer 1

I and some others have given this some thought, and we believe that the most effective things that you can do to help are the following:

1. You can share the proposal with your network to get more people to simply commit, a number of these people may already have 200+ reputation on StackExchange.
2. If you do not already, you can get 200+ reputation on a site other than Area 51 (area 51 reputation does not count, see here). This has the dual affect of both helping the proposal and also helping you to learn about StackExchange in preparation for the site launch. This really isn't as difficult as it sounds, and you can achieve this with a few good questions/answers. For recommendations on how, see this post. In addition, we are treating the 'synthetic-biology' tag on the Biology Stackexchange as our 'alpha' release. There should be questions there that you can answer and you can also use this tag to ask your own questions.
3. Support our community promotion ad proposals. We need +6 votes on the ads that we've placed for them to go into circulation on the sites, so any upvotes help: Biology SE proposal, Academia SE proposal

To help coordinate all this, we have created a new slack workspace where we are planning the development of the site, providing recommendations for good questions to answer to get rep, and generally engaging interested people before the site goes live. If you are interested you can contact me on LinkedIn or Twitter for an invite (links in my profile).

Answer 2

Add to the "science helping science" ads:

Since almost 10 years ago, the "Science helping science" ad has been on the Meta site of Physics.SE, and later also on Chemistry.SE, Astronomy.SE, Earth Science.SE, Engineering.SE, and OpenData.SE.

Synthetic Biology can be added under "commitments needed" to all of the above.

More places to add the ad:

• Space Meta (they are advertised on all of the above already, they might be welcoming).
• Operations Research Meta (they are advertised in some of the above already).
• Robotics Meta (they are advertised in all of the above already).
• Artificial Intelligence Meta (edit 60 of the Physics ad shows they were advertised there).
• CompSci Meta (edit 49 of the Physics ad shows they were advertised there).
• Data Science Meta (edit 40 of the Physics ad shows they were advertised there).
• Sustainable Living Meta (edit 17 of the Physics ad shows they were advertised there).
• Cognitive Science Meta (edit 2 of the Physics ad shows they were advertised there).
• Biology Meta (edit 1 of the Physics ad shows they were advertised there).
• Psychology Meta (edit 1 of the Physics ad shows that an earlier Psychology site was advertised there).
• Bioinformatics Meta (they don't yet have the generic ad that the above sites have, but they are still in Beta so they would benefit from the help).
• Economics Meta (they don't yet have the generic ad that the above sites have, but they are still in Beta so they would benefit from the help).
• Computer Science Meta (they graduated before the original Physics ad was made).
• Cross Validated Meta (they graduated before the original Physics ad was made).
• Theoretical Computer Science (they graduated before the original Physics ad was made).
• Any other sites you think may be appropriate
• We can also put a free Community Promotion Ad on PhysicsOverflow.

Here's the ad, copy-paste it into the above sites:

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Science proposals need your help! Consider committing to these, to make them successful & scientific:

Committers needed

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Site definition needed

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Sites in beta

Science and technology sites currently in beta include:

Answer 3

Check that those with 200+ rep on other sites signed up correctly. They may have joined Area 51 for the first time with an e-mail different than their SE accounts and so the reputation is not transferring.

See this post for an example of where a user signed up incorrectly then did it correctly immediately afterwards.