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The one-year anniversary of moms4mom is approaching (on September 13th). We think it's a good time for a bit of reflection. What's happening?We just passed 1000 questions! We continue to see a small but steady stream of new community members signing up, and we're continuing to see a slow but steadily increasing volume of traffic from web searches and links from other sites. After helping us out while we were on vacation, we've asked Kiesa to stay on as a new moderator. It certainly helps to have another set of eyes around watching for spam or content that doesn't follow the principles of the site. On that note, the community really does a great job of answering questions with very high quality answers. We think moms4mom really is a great resource for parents. What about the future?Our time as a StackExchange 1.0 site will expire on Wednesday, April 13, 2011. We asked you what you wanted to do and the consensus seems to be that you want to make moms4mom independent of StackOverflow LLC. This mirrors some of the sentiment over at meta.mathoverflow.net, though their reasons are slightly different. There have been a few different parenting-related site proposals over at the new StackExchange 2.0 area 51 site: The fact that there are other people interested in starting sites like this is great because it validates the need for a site like moms4mom. Looking at the proposals above, the only one that has any significant traction is the Just for Dads proposal. While moms4mom started out as a site for Moms, but quickly reacted to an influx of Dads and declared that we're a site for all parents, it's clear that the name of the site itself still deters some fathers from participating. In some cases it's simply because they wouldn't want to explain to someone else that they hang out on a site called moms4mom. (As a father myself, I'm not sure what to make of this. Most of the people on the StackExchange network are from a programmer background (myself included) and I would hope that the profession could have been a little bit more mature about this. At the same time, maybe the name thing is a great filter for our community. If you can get over your silly hang-ups about the site name, you're probably a more mature, thoughtful, and helpful community member. The quality of the people on moms4mom may have benefited from this fact.) If Area 51 does create a new parenting site, it only makes sense if it offers something decidedly different from what's already out there. Yahoo Answers already has a monopoly on unmoderated, emotionally charged, not-backed-up parenting answers, and we think moms4mom has the referenced, thoughtful, and professional side of parenting Q&A covered. You could start a new site about a niche topic (like Homeschool Help Desk), and if the existing StackExchange community had just enough members that were interested in it, I think it would fly. DiscussionWe can't rule out the possibility that Area 51 will produce a general parenting site that is more popular than moms4mom. There's no doubt it would have a very different flavor than moms4mom currently does (better or worse, depending on your taste). We still have time to make a decision about joining the StackExchange 2.0 network, or becoming completely independent. From our perspective, StackOverflow LLC has made no attempt to communicate a desire for us to join the StackExchange 2.0 network. We're nervous about joining a network that doesn't appear to want us, particularly when we can clearly survive on our own. Still, there are probably good benefits to joining the network. We still want to hear what the community wants to do. So, what do you think about moms4mom, where it's been, and where it's going? |
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I'd personally like to see moms4mom join the StackExchange 2.0 network. But I support whatever you all think is best for the moms4mom community. I'll share my own experience with migrating into SE 2.0. About five weeks ago, Basically Money joined SE 2.0 as money.stackexchange.com (but it may soon be known again as Basically Money, if the community chooses. I've transferred the domain name to Stack Overflow Inc. for when that happens.) Having made the move to the SE 2.0 model, I can almost only say good things about it. Here are some of the pros:
The cons:
I hope this has been helpful and informative. Very informative Chris. Thanks!
(Sep 14 '10 at 21:46)
Scott ♦♦
@Chris, thanks for your comments on my answer, and for your answer too, which made me think. I think my main worry about SE2.0 is contained in my second bullet point. Do you have any thoughts on that? I wonder if we brought the current user base along with us, that would be sufficient to maintain the 'family' feel...
(Sep 15 '10 at 14:59)
Benjol
You didn't write anything about compensation. Did you open Basically Money out of purely altruistic purposes, or did you have plans to make some money out if? I assume that you didn't get anything from StackOverflow LLC to compensate you for your work...
(Nov 06 '10 at 04:01)
ripper234
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@ripper234 My #1 purpose in opening Basically Money was to create and participate in a kind of community I felt would be at home on the Stack Exchange platform. Profits would've been nice, but secondary. I did put a lot of money into promoting the site so it would take, and my goal was to recover that investment over time. In the end, I did not recover my full investment. However, as to your assumption, I can't be specific, but refer to: http://meta.money.stackexchange.com/questions/4/what-should-we-use-as-a-domain-name/6#6 .. notably, Robert's comment. That is all.
(Dec 03 '10 at 09:06)
Chris W Rea
I just went looking for a/the parenting site on the StackExchange network and couldn't find it. I remembered this one did exist and went searching for it in order to ask a question. I think this site should seriously consider joining StackExchange, but I can understand not wanting to go first.
(Jan 10 '11 at 11:07)
g__
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Some thoughts, off the cuff:
Having said all that, it is frustrating to miss out on all the new 'shiny' toys that they're adding to SO (chat, for example)... Re: "the highest-ranking site of the 5 you mentioned is still not off the ground". Actually, I think a lot of people (myself included) have NOT committed to any of those proposals because the future of moms4mom.com isn't clear and we don't want to create a competing site. Consider, at the Parenting proposal, the first comment is "Have you seen moms4mom.com?" and that was up-voted 11 times. I suggest that if moms4mom.com weren't so successful under SE 1.0, there would certainly be a parenting proposal in commit or beta phase already.
(Sep 13 '10 at 13:22)
Chris W Rea
Further to my earlier comment: If Scott had posted a proposal at area51 to migrate moms4mom.com into SE 2.0 (as I have done with Basically Money) I can assure you it would have been in beta by now - me and many more like me would have put our support behind it.
(Sep 13 '10 at 13:24)
Chris W Rea
@Chris W Rea: Good points, definitely.
(Sep 15 '10 at 20:18)
Scott ♦♦
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@Scott - what are your current plans? Do you plan to migrate your main site to OSQA? Perhaps this deserves a separate question.
@ripper234: We've talked about it and decided to run it ourselves. We're pretty comfortable with OSQA. I should be able to get the existing moms4mom design to work on the OSQA site to maintain the look & feel. As for when... sometime before our time runs out on StackExchange.