Having gone on long car journeys with young children before the ACPED (Age of Cheap Personal Electronic Devices), I am very familiar with “Are we there yet?” Now I usually only hear it in my head as I try to make light of the longer than 12-hour flights I have to endure as an Australian who likes to attend CiviCon. Lately, however, it is there whenever I visit the CiviCRM Area 51 site on Stack Exchange. I want to be at the “beta” phase when we will actually be able to ask and answer questions.
We have a positive start with 253 people committed to using the new site. However we need 100 committers with a reputation of 200 or more on another SE site before we can transition to “beta”. We have only 61.
Michael McAndrew thinks we will get the extra 39 experienced committers we need, but “it will take a while”. Ever the pessimist, I am not sure it will happen unless more of our existing committers take up the challenge to build a 200 reputation on an existing SE site - so here comes the sales pitch.
Stack Exchange is not just for techies. Everyone should be able to find a site they can join as there are 121 sites covering diverse topics such as: Astronomy, Bicycles, Christianity, Drupal Answers, English Language and Usage, French Language, Graphic Design, Hinduism, Information Security, Japanese Language, LEGO® Answers, Movies &TV, Network Engineering, Open Data, Parenting, Quantitative Finance, Role-playing Games, Skeptics, Travel, Unix &Linux, Video Production and Writers.
You don’t have to be an expert; I am a native English speaker, whose formal English education finished when I left school “too many” years ago, but I joined the English Language and Usage (EL&U) site a couple of weeks ago and soon had a 200+ reputation. You gain reputation if you ask a question and people vote it up or if you submit an answer and people vote it up. If you happen to have a comprehensive answer for a really interesting question that hasn’t been asked before, Stack Exchange even encourages you to ask and answer your own questions.
When you join a site, add you name and the site here or post a comment on this blog. This will help us to help you. (How? I won’t be visiting the EL&U site very often unless I know one of our committers is aiming for 200 on that site. I won’t vote up rubbish questions or answers, but I can’t vote for anything if I don’t visit the site.)
So why not give it a go? I am longing for relief from “Are we there yet?” and its companion “When will we get to Grandma’s Beta?”
