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+.
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:
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?