Do we want a community blog?

Question

It's possible for a Stack Exchange site to get it's own blog provided we follow some steps to prove a couple things:

1. We want it
2. We can make it happen

I know some of our most active members like the idea of a site blog so I thought I'd get the ball rolling. Beta is not too soon to blog, but we do need an active community to keep the blog going. So you know, the community will take part in posting and vetting the articles, and we'll try and nail down the following before we actually get it:

1. The Scope
2. Who will contribute (tentative, we're not locked in to only certain people contributing)
3. The schedule

As a starting point an interesting idea is the Question of the Week (QotW) concept on Security. Regular postings like that help keep a blog active with quality content.

Remember the Blog can be more than a "greatest hits" of our questions/answers. We can also use it to share interesting opinions, findings or whatever as long as it's related to the topic (or our community).

Is a blog something we want? The next step would be to define what we want the blog to be about, first I want to know if the support is there. Please vote to indicate your approval and if you have any good suggestions, make them in an answer for when we start the next steps. We'll also need to know who's willing to write and what we want to write about.

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As a note I kicked off the blog process over on User Experience so I won't be able to manage the process over here like I try on UX. We'll need community members to manage the blog workflow so if you're an active member, throw your hat in the ring and offer to help out. It helps if we have more than one person acting as a caretaker for the blog anyway.

Answer 1

Schedule

A weekly schedule would be awesome, but I don't think it's feasible. We were aiming at a weekly schedule for the Programmers blog as well, but we soon realized that publishing once a fortnight was far more attainable. We really don't have to decide the schedule now and I'm proposing we do exactly what we did with the Programmers blog and decide the schedule after our first articles are already written and we've seen how much we can cope with in practice.

We'll have to have a few articles ready (written and proofread) before we launch anyway, to convince both Stack Exchange and ourselves that we can maintain a blog, so I think the smart thing to do here is to decide the schedule after we've seen how much time it take us to write at least four articles. If I remember correctly we had four articles ready before launching the Programmers blog, so that, in broad terms, also answers the question of how many articles SE expects us to have before they feel confident launching our blog. Five articles, as jmort253 suggests would be even better.

Blog maintenance

Three things:

• A blog chatroom,
• Blog Overlords, and
• Trello.

On Programmers we have a chat room dedicated to the blog, and when we're ready to launch The Workplace blog I think we should consider creating a dedicated chat room here as well. Any blog discussion that's not concrete enough to be posted on Meta should be held in chat, and a dedicated chat room is also very helpful for collaborations. Feel free to ping me in that chat room, if you want more details on the Programmers blog.

Next, the Blog Overlords. On Programmers, initially, there was a general feeling that the moderators would take care of the cruft on the blog, similarly to how we do in the main site. Or, at least, I had that feeling (I wasn't a moderator back when the first talks about our blog started). I don't know if the Workplace moderators are interested in contributing to the blog, but I think it would be better if the Blog Overlords were regular users.

We started out with one caretaker on the Programmers blog, and he kinda disappeared on us after a while, putting the whole project on hold (hey, real life happens - sometimes), so there really ought to be at least two caretakers. Our current Overlords, World Engineer and Dynamic, are responsible for:

• Setting up access to both Wordpress and Trello for new contributors,
• Guiding new contributors through our blog processes,
• Maintaining the blog chat room (they are both room owners),
• Always being on the lookout for spam comments, and
• Having final say in all things relating to the blog.

And of course, as every other blog contributor, they write and proofread articles. Both our Overlords volunteered for the role, and I'm quite sure me threatening to suspend them forever didn't really affect their decision to take point.

Finally, we've been heavily relying on Trello, to keep track of post ideas and publishing. Our board is private (and perhaps it shouldn't be), if you are interested in taking a sneak peak, ping me in the Programmers blog chat room and I'll give you access to it. All I need is an email and if you already have a Programmers account and want me to send the invite to your account's email, all you need to do is say so. If you don't want to use your Programmers email or don't have a Programmers account, just post your email and I'll delete the message right after I send you an invite.

Scope

I like the Question of the Week concept, but The Workplace is still in beta and we don't get that many questions per day to support a steady flow of QotW articles. It could work, but I see QotW more as a backup plan.

A great source of inspiration for blog articles is to think... non constructively ;) Most of the questions that we'd close as "not constructive" on the main site, would probably make great blog posts, and if you are interested in contributing, you should look at our highest voted closed questions for ideas.

Contributors

We need more than two. Beth and HGLEM can certainly cope, but we really need more than two people for the blog to be viable in the long run, at least four or five. Unfortunately I simply don't have the time to contribute to the blog, but I'm certainly hoping a couple more Workplace regulars step up, a Workplace blog would be awesome!

Answer 2

I wouldn't mind writing some blog entries either, there are some topics I would like to write about that haven't come up as questions. Since this isn't really time-limited (like say a political blog entry would be), I would suggest that we come up with 4 or 5 topics and have the blog entries written before we announce the blog. That way we know we have something to publish each week for a few weeks to get the blog rolling.

In some ways the blog format is almost better for Workplace than the question format.

Some subjects I would like to write about or see someone else write about:

• How to impress your employer with your performance
• How to behave in a new job
• How to leave a job
• Grief in the workplace (I've been blogging a good bit about grief at another site)
• What to do when your employee comes to you with a major personal problem that will affect work (death in the family, serious illness, etc) (I've been surprised we haven't seen more questions in this area. So few people seem to handle it well.)
• Making the adjustment from school to work
• Office politics

Answer 3

Sure, I'll chime in -

Yes, I'd love us to have a blog. I think we are starting to develop a vibe of what works and what doesn't that may be better addressed by a blog - the way Jeff did on Stack Overflow, than by a FAQ. Particularly because if we put all the stuff that comes up into FAQ form, we will have a long, possibly chatty FAQ.

And I'm willing to volunteer at a caretaker, although I'd really like a co-caretaker, as my time can get frenzied, and I don't want to drop the ball.

1.The Scope

While I like QotW on the Security SE, I think it may be premature for us. But I used to really like Jeff Atwood's periodic commentary on trends and the why's and wherefors of what works and what doesn't. I'd vote for that, but maybe with a backup plan of something else to talk about when there is no pressing issue - maybe interesting features of the population - ie, the population of questions, answers or currently active contributors?

2.Who will contribute (tentative, we're not locked in to only certain people contributing)

I'm willing to, but I like the idea of it being a pretty wide community. Both so that it doesn't get dropped when the one writer is busy and so that it has a community "voice".

EDIT - per discussion below - I'm up for any combination of writers that keeps up the good material but with a certain quality level. If there's an editor/approver capability, then sky's the limit.

3.The schedule

Weekly. That's my pick. Frequent enough to be interesting, not so frequent we are clawing for topics.

Answer 4

What we have so far:

Here's what we know so far, thanks to Beth and HLGEM's responses, and Rarity outlining the requirements to implement a blog:

Scope:

• See Beth and HLGEM's answers

Contributors:

• 2 authors

Schedule:

• Weekly

Pre-written articles:

• 1 out of 5 as of January 28th, 2013

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What's missing?

How many contributors do we need to get started?:

What I see missing here is the number of contributors. Both Beth and HLGEM are our top users, both with an impressive 10k+ reputation on a site that's still in beta. As a result, I'm confident these two people can meet the demands of a weekly schedule, but I also believe it would be more sustainable if we had more people to commit to contributing as authors, and to indicate how frequently that person would be willing to author (or co-author) a post.

We should define how many people, or perhaps contributions per quarter, are necessary in order to be successful with a blog. For instance, if we lose a contributor, will we still have enough content to meet the schedule and keep up with adding new content? With just 2 people, this assumes each person contributes 2 articles per month, or 8 per quarter.

How many prewritten articles do we need to jumpstart the blog:

I like HLGEM's idea of having some articles already written. But how many? With a weekly schedule, if we have 5 articles in the queue, then we could go 5 weeks without having a new article written. This is like having a blog savings account for the times when time is taken up by other events.

How many articles should we shoot for?

• We are aiming for at least 5 to get us started. As of January 28th, @Bethlakshmi has one article written so far. Nice work! :)

What is our timeline to implement a blog?

Perhaps the most important consideration is to come up with a timeline. When should we have all of the necessary contributors ready? When should the prewritten articles be ready? When is the date that we should be ready to approach Stack Exchange and say:

"We want a blog! We have X people willing to contribute, and those people have already written Y articles. We're ready to publish as soon as the blog is ready."

With the holidays coming, and things shutting down temporarily, I was thinking that sometime after the New Year would be a better target date, but it's up to you. To be clear, if we don't meet the decided critical mass of X articles and Y contributors by Z date, then perhaps that means we put the blog idea on hold until there's more support? What do you think?

Answer 5

I really want to see this happen now that we were featured on the SE podcast:

And now, this week’s Featured Site: The Workplace. It’s still in beta, and we don’t usually talk about betas in our featured site segment, but this site is especially interesting because its answers are much less factual than most other sites… and yet it’s still successful.

• Get to the point!
• How do I deal with difficult but talented employees? is relevant to David’s daily work life.
• There’s some good information on workplace transitions. Joel says it’s a self-help group for commiserating. Jay disagrees!

I have added a draft of a blog post explaining the difference between a Good Subjective question and a Great Question. I would appreciate anyone willing to review/edit it.

I would also like to hear about how the Workplace has helped Rhys' Career Development, and I think that several users could share some great information on the three biggest mistakes they've made in their career. I would also love to see one of our more experienced Workplace Experts write on Advice to New Hires.

I am more than happy to contribute multiple articles, or to edit any articles that need reviewing -- this would definitely be a positive thing to have with the increased exposure, and allow us to tackle some topics that may be useful to a broader audience but not great for individual questions.

Answer 6

Saw some topics today that would probably be candidates for the blog (I'm about halfway through drafting my first blog post hopefully will put it up on Trello this weekend) if anyone would be interested in writing them.

Successful Resume writing
Things to avoid in resume writing
Why Facebook is a terrible source for information on potential hires

Answer 7

A few days back, I was reading a blog Entry on How important is knowing how to program for TCS? in the CS Theory Community Blog. This blog entry was actually a summarization of one of popular question of the community. I really liked the concept of summarizing the highlighting points of a good question. I just thought that its all about Community, who wrote and publish the blog entries, and community members can not play any role in any of the blog articles. but as Rarity and jmort253 highlighted the role of community members in blog writing, I really found it an interesting concept.

Scope

As HLGEM and bethlakshmi have already suggested quite good blog entries. Though I have myself started working on Making the adjustment from school to work as suggested by HLGEM.

Also, I read some good guidelines about What to Write in the Stack Exchange Blog. Some of proposels, I found somewhat appreciable are,

• Interview top users. Just who is that user who is shooting up the reputation leagues?

• Highlight top content. What great question was posted on the site recently? Recognize it! Don’t just copy the question and its answers to the blog, blog about the question and its answers. A fine line there, eh? Delve deeper into the question or an answer. Add more context. Compare or analyze answers against each other. There is a lot to work with here.

Contributors:

Though, I dont have much knowledge about Blog caretakers management for other Blogs. But I'd like to suggest that bloggers should work in a Team.

Team might be constitued out of Content Writers, proofreaders and if possible Quality Enhancers. The team should be lead of by an Admin, who should have full command over the blog and others team mates.

Schedule

That's the main thing that should be taken care of. The schedule of blog entries will entirely depend on the Contributers and thier availability. However, we could start with 2 entries a month and once we get good command over the community blog, we could increase the number of blogs posts in a month. Though, not to burdernize it, an entry a week will be sufficient.