As the Computational Science proposal is about to move from commitment to beta, I would like to understand the expected etiquette surrounding the name changes it went through, as I believe it could have been handled better.
Since there was lots of discussion in the proposal announcements, I created a question to try and gather a community consensus. It appears that as a result of this question, the name of the proposal was changed to Scientific Computing, which caused a storm of criticism.
While responses to my question appeared to favour the change, the level of participation there was never as high as the level in the proposal announcements, leaving the consensus muddled. If you look at my question there is a clear preference for Scientific Computing but if you look at the announcements, there is a clear preference for Computational Science. Unfortunately the announcements obviously don't include the reasoning behind each suggestion, so could be considered less informed.
Now, I believe that the right decision was made in the end, but I realise that my original question should have been better. It should have been CW from the start, the original question should have included the one name proposal per answer and no duplicate name proposals suggestion. I should also have written a neutral question and then put my own feelings at the time into an answer, rather than writing a leading question.
So, when is the right time to discuss changing a proposal name? Should it be all done and dusted before the definition phase is over? Is it reasonable to still be discussing it during the commitment phase? If people really aren't happy with the name, is it Ok to discuss it on the meta site in private beta or even in public beta?
In response to my suggestion of taking the question to meta.scicomp.stackexchange.com
, Robert Cartaino♦ said:
We really try to resolve these issues before launch. Changing the "official name" displayed at the top of the site is problematic but not as big a deal as the selected URL. Changing the URL post-launch is almost a show-stopper.
link
andflag
under your post... Looks like it is specific to Area51 discuss.area51.stackexchange.com/questions/3114/…