Introduce sub-communities (or “Portals”) to prevent fragmentation

Question

There often are complaints from smaller and niche areas in the field of programming that their needs aren't met on SO.

The most frequent complaints include:

• Users from niche tags can be brilliant, but will never achieve site-wide recognition because of the lack of voting activity in their tag, and hence the impossibility to gain significant reputation

• There's no sense of community in niche areas, because there is so little activity.

The tag pages do offer some basic functionality like a list of top users and questions and such, but they don't do much in creating a community athmosphere.

The result is a tendency of programming topics to "separate" from SO and create their own SE proposals. This has worked well in some cases (like Game programming, which I gather is a great success), but in general, anything that drives traffic and content away from SO is no good.

One solution might be making users in those niche tags happier by

Creating sub-communities ("Portals") on SO

The following is a suggestion that could help creating a sense of community for niche areas on SO, without fundamentally changing the way the system works.

1. Define sub-communities that could benefit from having their own, defined "space" on Stack Overflow. For this example, let's pick Version Control.

2. Define tag sets that define the portal. A portal will contain a number of relevant SO tags. For the Version Control portal, these would be (pulling this out of my arse)

   version-control git svn mercury hg tfs .....

   Tags would not be exclusive to one portal, they could be shared between any number of them.

3. Each portal gets a custom front page which is the heart of the sub-community. It could look like this:

   http://fhc.quickmediasolutions.com/image/2036326068.png

   Some of the key features of the portal page would be

   • Per-portal chat rooms
   • Showing top users and rep leagues is a must for this to work
   • Show related jobs (from careers)
   • Allow portal-specific Meta discussion (on Meta.SE, tagged portal-version-control) with relaxed on-topic boundaries
   -

4. Portals would become first class citizens across the site, with the possibility to

   • Search, e.g. using [portal-version-control]
   • Show RSS feeds
   • List portals on the tags page, maybe above the tag list.

   • Get a proper URL, stackoverflow.com/portals/version-control

     -

5. Portals would be administered either by mods, or users especially proficient in the field - maybe determined by the accumulated number of upvotes in each of the portal's tags.

This would obviously be a huge enterprise development-wise, and a big change with many consequences. But it could be a good step - definitely better than having communities split away from SO.

Notes:

• Portals would not change the fundamental way how SO works. All the questions and answers would still be in one big pool. Portals are merely views with a bit of community functionality tacked on.

• New questions would have to be assigned to one of the portals, probably using a semi-automatic approach. There will be clear cases (like svn belonging to "Version control") and cases that require manual (Moderator? Community voting?) oversight.

• A SO portal ghost town is as bad as a SE ghost town. There would have to be a strong community desire to get a portal started, and a challenging proposal process.

To clarify: this proposal is to prevent fragmentation of SO, not to split SO into a multitude of smaller sites. "Portals" as used in this context are merely views with some community functionality attached to them.

Possible future additions:

• Portal Moderators who have moderating powers in their portal's tag set only.

• I'm sure more additions would come.

Related:

• How can we make compiler design and developer testing first-class citizens on Stack Overflow?

• Need feedback on company page idea (Michael had a very similar idea, but focused on companies, not areas of expertise)

Answer 1

The new silo sight version of the site appears to be serving this gist:

Announcing facebook.stackoverflow.com

We can now create a mini-site by selecting relevant tags (in this case, anything Facebook related) and grouping together just the content from those tags – so when you visit a mini-site, you’ll see only the content from those tags. Not only will you be able to see only questions related to Facebook, but the reputation on the user ranking pages will also only show rep earned on Facebook tagged questions.

Answer 2

I think this is a great idea. I don't think you need to "assign" questions to the portals, just let the questions with any of the tag set tags show up, i.e. the Portal would only have to be a view that is chosen by the user.

Each user could specify preferred views, so when the leagues were calculated who to include is easily determined. The "numbers" being run based on the appropriate tags.

Answer 3

The communities have fragmented themselves too far already: unix vs ubuntu vs superuser vs serverfault vs stackoverflow vs programmer feels silly to me. I'm interested in all of these, and wish they were all on one stack.

If questions are assigned to one of the portals, I would hope that I could still find them from the main SO questions page, still answer them whether or not I care about the portal, and be allowed to favorite-tag or dislike-tag them all I wish.

No more fragmentation in the stacks please.