Let's evaluate our progress!

Question

Since Community site self-evaluations were shut down last year, there hasn't been any replacement for them, which leaves it down to us to evaluate our own progress.

Therefore, I propose that we do just that - evaluate how we're doing as a whole. This includes answering questions such as

• are we getting discovered by the outside world?
• are we answering questions fully and appropriately?
• how satisfied are our users, both old and new?
• is there sufficient moderation?
• how are our various stats doing?
• what do we still need to work on? What are the biggest issues we face?

There are some ideas for statistics to evaluate in this meta answer; feel free to use those or make up your own. It's not all about stats, though - how the site feels and how its users feel about it is equally important.

How are we doing?

Answer 1

Mic test... Hi!

Even though I'm not actively using opensource.SE actively lately, I do surf by occasionally and I think it's doing well.

To address "are we getting discovered by the outside world?", I would like to point you to the search query ranking of (only) question I made: "How can large open source projects be monetized?"

It comes up on 9th of a DuckDuckGo query of "monetize open source project" and have gotten me a popular question badge for 1k+ views. I think this question is quite visible to the outside world and likely does the current 39 other popular question badge holders. (Even lately I'm still getting upvotes on the question.)

Previously, a new (as it says here) user left this comment on the answer:

I created an account just to upvote this answer. I was one of those taken in by the "Gpl is evil" propaganda, until I read this. Thanks for the great links & answer.

So I also think new users who find the site with helpful answers will likely be satisfied. If they don't, they might find their answer elsewhere, but having a centralized repository is probably a more fitting place for answers for them than random forums.

Answer 2

I'm a new user of this SE site, so I'll share some first impressions.

• The quality of answers is great. I have read a few already that have surprised me positively. The speed is also good. I posted a question yesterday and just a few hours after that I had very helpful comments.
• The number of questions is still low. On some areas I would have expected more, but I guess this will correct by itself.

As for how I came here, it was a bit of an accident. I'm using SE more actively because I'm pushing a proposal for a new site myself and I'm exploring other sites. I had some needs in this area and though that probably there should be site dedicated to licensing. Dropdown menu did the rest.

Answer 3

I'm relatively new here - I came here through asking a question about code licensing on another SE site.... then someone mentioned there was 'an open source stack'. And here I am.

Compared to some other SE sites I'm on, I've noticed the questions and answers here seem to be quite good - it feels like there's more quality.

While there's quality, there definitely isn't much quantity. I know 10 questions per day is the 'healthy beta' target defined by Area 51, we're currently on 2.9.

Of course I have no data to back this up, but it seems to me that the reasons could be...

• people not knowing we exist (currently getting 173 visits per day; 'healthy beta' target is 1500)
• good questions having already been asked
• there only being so many times one can ask 'is x license compatible with y'
• maybe even many programmers not caring about licensing!
• ... or could it be that we focus a lot on licensing and not much else?

The other Area 51 metric we fall short of is answer ratio, but we're getting quite close to this at 2 answers per question rather than 2.5.

The other two metrics, we are doing great on! Questions answered is sitting at 96% (the target is 90%), and I can definitely see the evidence of that as there's not a lot that goes unanswered here.

We're doing well on avid users too, with 158 (target 150) at 200+ rep, 15 (target 10) at 2k+, and 9 (target 5) at 3k+.

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I mentioned licensing above. One thing that strikes me is that a lot of questions here are about it, whereas our site description doesn't even mention licensing by name:

...a question & answer site for people producing, distributing, marketing and monetizing Free and Open projects. This site is not limited to software, but also covers art, literature, hardware, databases and more.

Perhaps licensing is one of the most confusing aspects of distribution for people, but one could be forgiven from thinking we're a site that is just about licensing:

• our top 10 tags are currently licensing (195) gpl (136) license-compatibility (82) license-recommendation derivative-works creative-commons law copyright mit attribution
• contributor (42) comes in at the 11th most used tag, as the first that doesn't necessarily center around licensing
• apart from closed questions, there are only four questions currently on the home page that are not about licensing, and only one of them (IMO) is a good quality question
• going back to our first questions does show some good non-licensing questions, but licensing does still dominate it

I guess my point is: we're doing well answering the licensing questions. But is there enough about licensing to sustain us as a site? Should we be doing something to intentionally seed a widening of our focus?