@RydwolfPrograms How did you find people to commit to your site?

:P

I think he also tried to e-mail experts in this subject.

But there are a lot of committers who are not on Code Golf

You know, the earliest committers

How did he find such an avid group of users

I found out from a message in the Future of Coding Slack (existing interest community)

Also, I'd like to know where he found the experts? It's a pretty niche topic.

It was advertised on Reddit

No idea. The Reddit advertising was done by another user (lyxal), not Rydwolf. There were probably also some users who found out about the proposal and got their friends to join, since there are a ton with several referrals

I assume they advertised in other rooms here on SE?

Ok. I thought he did everything by himself

So you only need to advertise it on social media and the SE community will automatically form (?)

As well as relevant SE sites, I think

Then you'd have people to help you advertise

@jfo Only if there is sufficient interest

We got lucky to find a existing enthusiasitic community

And it only really worked because there where a large number of us promoting

Would it have been easier to find an existing enthusiastic community if the topic was broader (or more popular)?

The existing PL community is pretty big, really

Or communities

Where is the PL community?

Many places

@jfo It's a fairly substantial academic field on its own with its own literature and venues and groups, there are pretty large groups of people on Reddit and IRC, there are more specialised ones like the Future of Coding one I mentioned or esolangs.org, there's a fair number of people working on industrial languages that have their own corporate communities. There are overlaps between all of those

@jfo Probably, but it's not only about population but also about enthusiasm. Less people may be willing to fight area51s bugs to figure out how to commit to a broad topic they care only mildly about

@MichaelHomer How did you find those communities? Search engine?

Some of us where part of these groups and they all link to eachother

@jfo I did a PhD in programming languages, so not a very generalisable approach (but effective for finding the community of practice)

What was the initial community linked to by the PLDI Area51 proposal, then?

Some discord server

I don't remember exactly which one

I didn't really learn much from this answer, so I'll directly ask my question here.

How to organize/find an initial community for a SE site proposal?

You can't really control it, just be lucky and have a large amount of people who are willing to help

Ok. Then how was the discord server set up - was it based on an existing community?

It was just discussed on chat here mostly chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/240/the-nineteenth-byte

@mousetail About the "some of us" part: I think there is a large gap between the initial Discord server definition and the time when people started committing to the proposal.

How did people outside of CG.SE learn about your Discord server? Did you do some advertising?

Yea like we said everyone posted it in whatever communites they where part of

And we all voted on eachothers posts so they would actually be seen

It's all about teamwork

Also you are forgetting that there was a definition phase before the commitment phase, and we barely made it out of that before the 4 month limit

commitment phase is much easier

Much harder than I thought. So only one or two people are interested for every community you've advertised in?

We got like 40 from the reddit community, but the majority was 1 or 2 per community yes

I spammed in like 20 discords but I have only 1 referral

That might just be being terrible though, others got higher success rates

How many people did you get from Discord?

Also, could you explain what you mean by "higher success rates"?

I got nobody in discord during the commitment phase and maybe 4 during definition. I don't know how many others got

Higher Success Rate = More of their advertising actually got a single person joining

Have you tried Facebook Groups?

Some people might have

I don't have facebook personally, but others may have advertised there

A lot of the people with a high number of referrals never joined this chat room so we don't really know how they did it

Can you give some examples of the people with a high number of referrals?

Nike Dattani got 11

note the number states isn't really accure, since often people strip out the long link

So people may have helped much more than their visible referral number

Especially on discord where if you include the referral information it would be a 3 line long link which people are more reluctant to click, so people mostly strip it off

@mousetail Was that the definition phase or the committment phase?

Both

We posted on reddit twice for each, we got around that many both times

Under the same subreddits each time?

Besides, from where did your team of advertising expand from? I think it couldn't have been reddit.

How did you form the team?

@jfo this whole thing, including advertising, was masterminded by a group of about 5 users from TNB

@jfo Code golf like we said

In other news we need this feature: meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1696/… We're going to get a lot of opinion based questions so we need to be prepared

@mousetail anybody with 15 rep in the private beta can VTC any question

I know

I mean as the close reason text

the off topic close reason comes by default and I dont think it can be removed (even by CMs)

That's why we need that feature

@jfioasd Ideally you would have one already

Making a proposal then finding a community is kinda putting the cart before the horse