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Proposal: Healthcare IT

We’ve all been watching the site languish in the commitment phase for a long time now. I wrote Failure to Launch: Healthcare IT Q&A over a year ago. It seems that this reality still holds true.

From the Area51 FAQ:

If a proposal loses momentum, it may be reevaluated or merged with similar proposals.

I think it’s safe to say that our momentum has been lost. So where do we go from here?

  1. What does “reevaluated" mean?
  2. Even if there were similar proposals (e.g. Bioinformatics) to merge with, how is this done?

I think it would be better to be proactive and take steps one way or another -- either take some actions to get it going or just declare it dead.

I also think this proposal exposes a flaw in the SE site building process. The fact that it's clear we'll never get off the ground should have been flagged and dealt with a long time ago.

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Uh? Looking at the graph, it has been growing at a pretty constant rate. – Lohoris Sep 13 '11 at 21:16
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2 Answers

up vote 4 down vote

I wish I had a dollar for each person who claimed the Area 51 process is broken. It's not and it works amazingly well.

Why is Healthcare IT failing? Looking at the metrics, the problem is with the commitment score. So all it requires is people still interested in the site to recommit.

But that isn't happening because most of the people aren't regularly checking the site to see how its progressing. If they were, they would have already recommit.

The fact is: As it stands this site doesn't have enough people who are still interested in the site enough to see it launched.

The system is designed to let languishing proposals to languish, because nobody else cares, why should the people running the site care? Already a very low percentage of people who commit actually follow through on that commitment. The idea is to launch a site which already has a community ready to go, the Healthcare IT proposal doesn't have that community. It has a bunch of people who decided to commit, but have not decided to actively maintain that commitment.

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Just want to add that the site looks like it will gradually progress to launch. There are new people slowly pushing the score up. But the above still stands, the site is designed to launch new sites only when there are active commitments. – xiaohouzi79 Sep 15 '11 at 22:40
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up vote 2 down vote

I actually thought the Healthcare IT proposal was doing relatively well for a site that appears to have a significant number of new users. The committers graph looks to be rising at a steady pace (compare, for example, the Libraries proposal).

Furthermore, the last time I checked the proposal had 100% of the total number of required committers and 98 of 100 required active network users (200+ rep on at least one other site). It looks to me like the proposal in question is now reasonably close to being ready for beta.

I'm not certain, but given the length of time in the commitment stage it seems plausible the commitment score has aged. If that is the case, and I understand the system correctly, then a bit more recommitting by early committers may help raise that score.

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Think past the commitment phase. For Beta: "1,500 visits per day is good, 500 visits per day needs some work." This site has had ~17 visits per day since inception. For some narrow topics a dedicated core of high rep users (e.g. French Language & Usage -- 42% Enthusiast) can get a site launched, but even their longevity is questionable. HIT is too broad a topic to muster that core group and it doesn't have the general audience size required to drive participation (as we've seen over the last year). I just don't see how this is going to fly. – Bob Nadler Aug 27 '11 at 18:27
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