Proposal: Worldbuilding
In the Event this site makes it to beta and 'production' what sort of events could we host to make it a more lively community?
3 Answers
I'm glad you brought this up. With the progress we've been making over the last few weeks, it is becoming more and more likely that this proposal is going to make it, which is good.
Your question brings up something that I've thought about as well.
Longer Term Collaborative Worldbuilding for the Duration of Beta
I thought as a way to stimulate the beta and populate it with good questions, some people might be interested in doing some collaborative world building while the beta is running. (Perhaps longer.) I'd imagine it being done under a Creative Commons license that allowed for people to actually create books, games, etc., in the created worlds.
I honestly don't think Stack Exchange would have the ability to actually host/run this, but we could easily find a separate site (a Wiki site somewhere, probably) to run it, and then run relevant questions back into the Worldbuilding Q&A site.
Periodic Day-Long Worldbuilding Competitions
I think it will take a while before we'd have enough people to justify this, but I think it could be cool to schedule periodic friendly competitions that involve worldbuilding. Perhaps things like pick a specific functional area that people are interested in exploring, rather than complete universes from scratch.
Regularly Scheduled Chat Discussions
We could also have regularly scheduled chats. Perhaps once a week or once a month or something. Being located around the world makes things tough, in this regard, but I think there's a way to make it work.
Perhaps the topic would be something like "Tools for Generating Planet Names", and we could have a 30 or 60 minute discussion about the available tools and the tradeoffs they all have.
Anybody would be welcome to come and throw in their two cents.
I like your idea of hosting certain activities offsite since they don't really fit this network's Q&A purpose.
My idea in this vein is to have people actually present their worlds to the group, answer questions, solicit feedback, etc. This actually led to my question on content protection. So if we have an off site location with more strict rules around that people could utilize the group that develops around this site as a resource for evaluating the worlds they create. They can also provide advice on getting started etc for people just trying it out.
If you add questions that allow for people to talk about their favorite stories, it might give it a kickstart. I had a talk about worldbuilding with my friends (I intended to make a website for this myself) and i believe that people would enjoy fact-checking existing movies or comics.
I don't know if it'd be okay to use names like Batm*n, but it'd certainly be fun to be able to say have a documented answer explaining why it couldn't happen the way it happens in the story because of X and Y. Or say in Battlestar G*ll*ctica, such technology would imply the existence of such other, rendering such episode incoherent.
example of what i mean here http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/63276/worldbuilding-what-would-happen-if-an-anonymous-billionaire-vigilanti-bypassed-l/69034#69034
If you don't use names (Batm*n, Battlestar G*ll*ctica...), these question become proper worldbuilding questions, while still attracting energy and crowd.
