How can we get people to participate on Meta sites?

Question

We have a rather disappointing situation on Programmers.SE. Two discussions that one would think would be enthusiastically supported, are now kind of stale.

The first one is on getting our own community blog, and the second one is for our birthday celebration event. The extremely weird stalemate is that one of our mods posted a question suggesting one event, and I posted an answer raising concerns about that event and proposing an alternative. Both are upvoted and no other answer appeared that would possibly break the tie.

I've spammed our chat room quite a few times, trying to get more people to participate on both discussions, with little effect.

I don't really know how to measure Meta participation and what would be considered healthy. The only number I think is relevant is that only two non-moderators have gotten the bronze discussion badge. And we can exclude the one guy, he's just noisy and opinionated and likes to make a fuss about unimportant things.

Given that the community has 40k members, I'd say our Meta participation is pathetic. I'm not really active anywhere else, so I can't really compare.

Anyways, my questions aren't really P.SE specific:

1. How can I evaluate Meta participation? For all I know, my perception may be completely wrong.
2. In any case, what can we do to get more people involved? What's your war stories?

I will raise my concerns on P.SE Meta at some point, but I would love to hear how the other communities handled similar issues.

---

Although as Jeff pointed out P.SE is doing pretty good when it comes to new Meta posts, I wasn't totally convinced, so I gathered the totals for most mature sites¹. It appears that compared to other sites we (P.SE) aren't doing very well (sorted on Meta questions per users):

Site          Questions Meta   Users   M/Q       M/U       
--------------------------------------------------------
SciFi              2290   354   4000   0.15459   0.08850
Tex               14014   630   9200   0.04496   0.06848
Gaming            14346  1023  15000   0.07131   0.06820
Photography        4290   394   6600   0.09184   0.05970
Math              34657  1092  19000   0.03151   0.05747
Drupal             7788   240   4600   0.03082   0.05217
Physics            5874   311   6000   0.05295   0.05183
Cooking            4921   356   6900   0.07234   0.05159
English           12764   771  15000   0.06040   0.05140
GIS                5926   192   4400   0.03240   0.04364
CrossValidated     7304   290   6900   0.03970   0.04203
DIY                3456   155   4400   0.04485   0.03523
WebApps            6473   310  13000   0.04789   0.02385
UX                 3203   223   9400   0.06962   0.02372
Apple             12101   347  15000   0.02868   0.02313
Ask Ubuntu        33678   803  35000   0.02384   0.02294

Programmers       16005   857  40000   0.05355   0.02143

WebMaster          7801   204  10000   0.02615   0.02040
Game Dev           6078   201  11000   0.03307   0.01827
SuperUser        108857  1308  84000   0.01202   0.01557
ServerFault      101739   732  71000   0.00719   0.01031

I have no idea of the quality of Meta participation on the other sites, and I'm fully aware of how useless numbers can be on their own. But since I went ahead and wasted 20 minutes, thought I'd share.

_{¹ I gave up when it became really boring.}

Answer 1

I don't believe the two specific issues you mentioned—the Programmers birthday contest and the blog—are indicative of poor meta participation.

I'm active on about a half-dozen sites—ranging from sites older than Programmers to newer beta sites—and from what I can tell, Programmers definitely has one of the most active meta-discussion communities, and it's been getting more active recently as non-moderators such as yourself take more ownership of stuff like general support and moderation issues.

The birthday contest and the blog require three things:

• Community buy-in: we mostly have this, although it took some time
• A point person to coordinate the logistics of setting up the contest/blog: we don't have this
• Stack Exchange, Inc. buy-in: more on that in a second

On Programmers, one of our big problems is that there are a lot of opinions about how things should go, and a lot of "I want this to happen", but not a lot of people effecting change themselves. Issues brought up by the community that could be self-handled (like a host of moderation issues) rarely are, and instead get handled by the two (three until recently) active moderators.

So, in the case of the contest and the blog, it felt like the expectation has been that moderators would do something and they'd magically appear. However, while I think it's fair to say that we think the ideas are great, we really have no desire for the additional workload and be the only ones organizing such things: we were really expecting members of the community to step up.

When we saw that wasn't happening, we asked SE on a number of occasions what exactly was required to get the blog and contest going, but we haven't gotten much: we were pointed to this blog post and told someone on CHAOS was made aware of the contest ideas, but that's been pretty much it.

Without having a clear idea of how to move forward, we've tried to push things forward, but have been met with resistance from the community, who seems perfectly content to continue discussing more ideas rather than moving forward with any one idea.

So we moderators—who aren't really interested in heading these things in the first place—are left with no useful advice to give the community about how to move forward, and thus these things just flounder for months.

So as I said, I don't think it's lack of participation: it's lack of guidance and help setting this stuff up. Some sites—like DIY, Parenting, SciFi, and Gaming—do get that help directly from SE, but I guess we're not lucky enough.

So moving forward, I think we need regular community members—who are really interested in seeing these things happen and know how to set them up—to step up and handle them. I wish I could give advice as to what that means: perhaps SE can shed some specific insights and/or instructions on our meta to let the community know how to move forward.

Answer 2

The number of meta posts isn't everything. To take examples from sites I frequent, Unix & Linux is a well-oiled site, remarkably free of conflict; its meta has, if not cobwebs, then at least dust, mainly the occasional retag request. Science Fiction & Fantasy has had a very active meta lately, but most of the participation comes from a few core users. You shouldn't judge metas by their traffic but by whether they meet their goals. I think U&L meta meets its goals because it's there for the very rare issues that come up. Meta.Scifi less so: support requests are answered fine, but policy discussions don't always gather a healthy level of participation. A meta that's dominated by complaints against moderators is not a nice place.

I think there are two main ways of getting the right kind of participation on meta. The main way is to engage people in community discussions. Don't debate whether a close-worthy question is salvageable in comments: vote to close, post one comment explaining your point of view, and if anyone disagrees, move the discussion to meta. If policy issues arise, discuss them on meta, then apply any emerging consensus consistently, referring anyone who objects to the meta discussion (and don't do anything that's hard to reverse if you think the meta consensus may yet change). Basically, be proactive in moderating the site to force people to address the issues with proper argumentation in meta discussions.

A secondary way to engage interest in meta is to run community contests or topic of the time period. Travel often does a region of the day (mostly discussed in chat), Literature has a book club, Gaming and Scifi have promotional grants, Super User and Security have questions of the week…

Answer 3

It could be that programmers is still a bit young of a site to have these kinds of celebrations yet -- it's just over a year old...

https://blog.stackoverflow.com/2010/12/introducing-programmers-stackexchange-com/

... and as I recall we were still working through some fairly divisive teething issues on the site not less than 6 months ago. So perhaps the site is still in its childhood and simply needs more time to grow a healthy, strong community?

Answer 4

I'd also like to see meta participation pick up. You're examples may be bad, but I think you're right about meta participation on P.SE.

Here are two suggestions I would make, coming from the standpoint of a regular user who took a long time to get understand what meta was for and to interested in it:

Help make more people aware of what meta is

I was not actually aware of meta for quite a while after I started using stack exchange sites. Actually, I was vaguely aware of it, but assumed it was all boring stuff about what was on/off topic, or things like that. Now that I realize what is discussed on meta, I'm quite interested in it :)

As for how we can make people more aware...

• we could move the section about meta and what it's for closer to the top of the FAQ. I doubt anyone reads our entire FAQ because it's so long, and the meta link gets very lost at the bottom. In addition, I think the description of it is bad.

• add some kind of description about what Meta actually is on its home page. As it stands now, a user's opinion on meta will be shaped by what questions happen to be on the front page, and if the user doesn't find any of those questions interesting, they're likely to assume the site is uninteresting and not come back

• link it in comments more frequently. For example, if you are closing a question, provide a meta link with your comment on why the question was closed, and point them to either an existing meta question which explains why their questions was closed (or better yet, one that tells them how to revise their question to get it re-opened), or just tell them they can post a question on meta if they disagree with the closure.

Stop being so aggressive with downvotes

New users don't understand why they're getting downvotes. We've trained them to think of downvotes as negative, so when they ask/answer something and it gets downvoted, they think that they are doing something wrong.

The very first meta question I posted was asking about the possibility of implementing some kind of poll-of-the-day option to P.SE. It was downvoted, and even though it was explained to me that downvotes simply mean users disagree, it still made not want to participate in meta for a year or more afterwards because I felt I had somehow done something wrong.

A much more welcoming solution would be to post an answer/comment disagreeing with the question, and let it gather upvotes.

Basically what I'm saying is, use comments/answers to answer the question, not up/down votes. I'd prefer to use votes to see how much support an idea has, not have it show a skewed sum of people who upvote - people who downvote. I have no idea if a question has 100 upvotes and 100 downvotes, or simply no votes at all.

You may or may not agree with me on this, but I also feel that with smaller communities it is too easy to drive away people with different opinions. If someone posts something contrary to what the active meta group believes, the question will get a lot of downvotes and end up driving the user away. This makes the meta communities smaller and less diverse. This isn't really a problem in SO's meta, where the meta community is large and full of people with different opinions, but I do see it as a problem in smaller communities.