Practices for defining and getting commitment

Question

What are "good" ways to promote a promote a proposal during the definition phase? And during the commitment phase?

In the definition phase you'll need 60 followers and 5 on/off-topic questions. I did promoted the definition in some linkedin groups will this get me what I wan't (a good definition of the community), since some probably never uses an exchange site? Are there examples that this went right or wrong?

On the otherhand, the commitment phase, needs 100 commitments of people with a reputation of 200 on other stackexchanges. I could image that this is a problem with some proposals. Are there ways to promote a proposal under existing users without spamming them or spamming the exhange?

Answer 1

In my experience, the easiest way to get a proposal into beta is to start with an existing community whose members agree that Stack Exchange is the platform for them.

Two fairly recent examples

• SharePoint
  Proposed: 6 February
  Commitment began: 8 February
  Beta began: 7 April

• Bitcoin
  Proposed: 29 March
  Commitment began: 23 May
  Beta began: 30 August

  In both cases, plenty of people were interested; the time in commitment was mostly spent getting 100+ of them to earn 200+ rep on any (non-A51) SE site.

On the other hand

• Linguistics
  Proposed: 17 June 2010
  Commitment began: 3 January
  Beta begins: 13 September (approximate)

Fifteen months between proposal and beta is a long time. It's not uncommon for it to take over a year, though, as Signal Processing, Literature, Personal Productivity, Travel, Philosophy, Astronomy, and Gardening and Landscaping (among others) all found out.

My recommendation is not to go after existing SE users; instead, find outside people who are already interested in your topic. Your goal then is to:

1. Get them to sign up for your proposal
2. Get them to earn 200+ rep

Step 2 is the difficult part, as can be seen at the SmugMug, Roblox, and Persian Information Technology and Computer proposals.

Have patience, and good luck!

Answer 2

The question is not how to promote your site, but how to promote it to experts in its special field.

I wrote here

What should we do to increase visits of Area 51?

and here

https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/105734/shouldnt-i-be-able-to-cancel-a-upvote-on-a-worse-answer-after-seeing-the-better-r

about it. Dont want to repeat as discussions on AREA51 seem anyway pretty pointless as not highly frequented and not observed by SE representatives.

If your site is not related to programming or hobbys of programmes currently its extreme hard to find commiters with >200 rep, just look how long standard topics like chemistry/biology need to go to private BETA (over 1 year old) With current system it must not even be the case, that these site will have high quality, as mainly programmers and not biologists or students of biology have commited. You will not find many of those guys on SE currently, just curious hobby enthusiasts and in best case bioinformaticians. And even if you have a list of ones you can directly email a link, they will need 15-30 minutes to get why they should commit esp. to this site or upvote and ask questions in definition phase although there is no light that this site will launch in near future. The best thing you can try is to get commiters from other already launched sites related to your topic to commit/follow to your site, but then they can only commit to 3 sites I dont know, looks like gambling to me if your topic is not related strongly to currently high frequented sites. Probably biology will need another year till it starts, i doubt 200 users can then establish a starting quality when the site gets immediately a invasion of thousands of exponentially growing hobby interested biology enthusiasts on the popular SE network. Same as for physics.SE here. The quality of scientific site here has to be controlled by voting system (experts have higher question upvote strength), not by a not adapted definition and commitment phase for those topics as it is currently