How can we involve users who committed to site but aren't participating?

Question

I was just looking over the Area 51 page for the site and noted that more than 100 users signed up for the beta (of 220) that committed to the site initially. Yet, we appear to only have 17 avid users. Can we invite the users who signed up to participate more? Is there anything we can do to better involve them in the site?

This post has been migrated from the Open Science private beta at StackExchange (A51.SE)

Answer 1

Free beer.  (Stolen from "One Froggy Evening".)

I suggest one (1) polite reminder by email at most, and posting on appropriate metas and newsletters at StackExchange.  I recommend divvying up the list of people to be contacted among those avid enough to participate here and have each of those mail the people on their portion, to show existence of a community worth joining.  While some people who signed up may not care any longer, hopefully most have just forgotten or have not gotten the news.  Also, ask them what it would take to get them to join.  Some of them might know.

 

Gerhard "Just Checking Out This Place" Paseman, 2015.09.11

Comments

Thanks. Contacting the owners of the imported user profiles is cumbersome indeed. I went through all the profiles with more than 100 credit points and tried to contact those who entered their clear names. Some of them reclaimed their profiles.

I would be happy to see someone continue this effort. Especially people who participated in the private beta on StackExchange would be more likely to recognize user names.

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Hi Gerhard, I just noticed that you have written another answer. Great! I am just wondering why you don't register as a user. Then you would not expose your IP address every time you contribute, and you could receive (optional) notifications about comments and replies.

Answer 2

This is not an answer but a suggestion about some operational procedures for this site.

In general, the SE sites handle questions like these in their own "meta" sites so that people asking about the site itself (mostly moderators I would assume) can have a forum to discuss the site in question without filling the main site with self referential questions.  May I suggest a "meta" site be created and questions like these move there?

Comments

Have you noticed that as on SE, all questions categorized either as 'Open Science' or 'Meta'? So the distinction you suggest is already recorded in the data. Do you suggest to hide all questions in the Meta category be default?

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@christian I see, I didn't see that.  That's great that there's a tag already in place.  I'm not sure what the best way to proceed is (maybe having meta questions interleaved is the right way to go). IMO, at the least, the "meta" questions should have some visual differentiation, like a different color.  It might be worthwhile to actually put them in their own up Q&A subsection, I don't know.

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I think you are right. Let's discuss this with the admins and moderators. Do you want to be one?