I work at Stack Exchange in the ol' community development department, and I would like to say both "hello" to the GIS community and inform you that we think GIS has shown a lot of potential for awesome, exponential growth. We want to focus some of our energy on the site.
One suggestion I have for making GIS even more awesome: voting. Many questions have a score of 2 or lower, which gives the impression that every question is as good as every other question. If you have spare time on the site, here is a list of 73 questions from the GIS site that meet one of these 2 criteria:
- questions with the most views and a score under 2
- questions with over 3 answers and a score under 2
These are the questions that have had a lot of activity and eyeballs on them. The awesome questions should numerically appear superior to the less-awesome questions. So, your mission (if you choose to accept it) is to check out those questions and vote on them based on their quality, vote on the answers based on their quality, edit the titles or body if they need it, vote to close questions if need be or share questions you think are interesting.
Now, honestly, GIS is doing a fairly decent job with voting when compared to other sites. I just think this could be a fun (or at least interesting) way to get our involvement going. Maybe those questions will be like a trip down GIS-memory lane? Maybe these questions will uncover some cool promotional ideas you have long forgotten?
This is the first of a lot of exciting things we'll be doing with GIS, so if you have any ideas about what we could do to help the community, please start discussing it on Meta and chat! I read GIS' Meta regularly and will be hanging out in the chat room, so please ping me if you have any big ideas. Let's see if we can make them happen!
Regarding voting, how do you think that GIS' voting compares to the other Stack sites you use? Do you have any other suggestions for how to increase voting awareness? Is voting awareness something you even think needs to be addressed? If there are bigger issues with the site, please make a Meta post about your concerns!
As whuber mentioned, views do not equate to votes. I think that since these questions are representing GIS in the wilds of the internet, we should do a quality check on them. If a bad question has a million views, it should have a low score. But newbies who find our site through that question should then see that that question has a low score and a lot of good questions have higher scores, thus illustrating that the question they found through a search engine is not that in-line with the site.