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:
- How can I evaluate Meta participation? For all I know, my perception may be completely wrong.
- 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.