Site Launched, who is next? [closed]

Question

Movies and TV is now a Full Fledged Site! With a fancy new design! Congratulations to them.

Now we all want to know what the order of the remaining sites is...right? Who's next to get their fancy design out of the beta sites that are already scheduled for graduation?

There was some mentioning of the graduation queue by an SE employee in a comment thread under this related answer a while ago, as well as the fact that this queue is ordered somehow:

Current list in the queue is: Salesforce, Expression Engine, Anime, Computer Science, Japanese, Cryptography, Movies, Blender, and English Language Learners.
...
As far as I'm aware, it's ordered. Salesforce and Expression Engine are currently in progress.

From which Salesforce and Expression Engine already graduated in order, and now Movies & TV.

However, this comment is already some months old and the recent graduation of Movies & TV suggests that this ordering is not entirely strict. I'd thus like to know if there is any information how the graduation process proceeds. Which site will be next? Is this queue still valid or has it changed? Is it a reasonable hint at the order of graduation at all?

I am sure that the list has been updated as of right now it appears that these are the beta sites that are waiting on design:

• Anime and Manga
• Code Review
• Computer Science
• Chemistry
• Japanese
• Cryptography
• Blender
• English Language Learners
• Music

Is there an order?

Is there a timeline?

This Code Review Meta has been pointing to the idea that Design is something that floats on the wind and lands whenever the wind stops blowing.

Answer 1

Sites and their communities aren't built on production lines nor is their progress set on a fixed schedule… so unfortunately it would virtually impossible to answer your question in our current workflow.

There are very few minimum criteria¹ for when a site becomes eligible for graduation, so the actual deciding factors are still largely subjective. We are generally looking for a robust site with a steady stream of high-quality quantity questions, enough to keep folks interested in the site on a sustained basis. We look at the turnover rate to see if the community has attracted an avid, core group of users. We look for an active and functional governance; i.e. does the community respond to and act on meta issues as they come up? Is their purpose and their scope pretty rock solid, or are there issues that still need to be resolved? We also look at the viability of holding a functional election (an intrinsic part of graduation). So generally speaking, we look for a site that has a sustained level of activity that all-but-guarantees the site can maintain a healthy pattern of growth for the foreseeable future.

But graduation doesn't happen on cue like a badge. We don't have a set goal that says "if you do {x}, you will graduate." We are getting there. We are honing in on those elusive "objective guidelines" that we'll (hopefully) be comfortable enough to publish and rely on exclusively — but we're not there yet. So graduation-checks come up periodically, and if everything looks good to go, we'll submit the site for their design.

Sending a site to the "graduation queue" and getting a design published are currently two different things. We recently hired some fantastic new designers to help clear the backlog, but there is a still about 9 sites waiting for a design, last I checked. But site designs aren't completed on a production line either. A designer works on them as they are able (amidst all the bug reports and feature requests that are interspersed throughout their workflow). And which sites are completed first simply depends on who is available and how much work it takes.

So all in all, anything I can report here would be wildly inaccurate and subject to change. So rather than raising expectations over "who's next", it's simply more prudent to wait and see.

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¹_{Technically speaking, the "minimum requirements" for a site to become eligible are: >90 days (minimum) in public beta, 10+ users with 2,000 rep, and 5+ users with 3000 rep, although these numbers are never the constraining factor.}

Answer 2

Sites scheduled for graduation.

Whenever there is a backlog of sites which have already been determined to have reached a point where they are ready to graduate, it is entirely up to the design team in which order they get done.

Designing sites takes a lot of time and a lot of inspiration. They not only have to write custom layouts and CSS, but they also have to think up ideas that would fit with the site nicely. Some sites are just plain harder than others.

The fact that a site got a new design that was near the end of that "ordered" list released by Stack Exchange in a comment proves that there is no real order in which these sites will get their designs. So your best advice on which one is next is "just wait and see."

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Sites not yet scheduled for graduation.
^{Included for the sake of not removing previous information.}

There is no "order of the remaining sites" - sites graduate as Stack Exchange determines they are ready and not all sites are going to be ready for graduation.

Answer 3

It's worth noting that a few sites have received custom designs without graduation. They're the so-called sponsored sites; when a third-party company decides to sponsor a Stack Exchange site, that means that there is some budget to create and implement a custom design. This recently happened for the following sites:

• Quantum Computing
• Artificial Intelligence

which are (if you look at the privilege levels and Area 51) technically still beta sites.