Is the questions metric key if the PM site is to avoid being cancelled after beta?

Question

As this meta post points out PM-SE is not going to have a strong case for continued existence based on the 5 core measures published on Area 51.

The metrics published at Area 51 are a bit pessimistic looking, with questions per day perhaps the key driver - more questions will result in more visits, more signups and more avid users. So I think we should consider driving up the questions asked metric to save the site.

Questions Per Day

• <5 Worrying
• 5-15 Okay
• 15+ Excellent

Currently 234 questions have been asked in 47 days, 3.6 per day.

For this to move to an 'Okay' 6 a day requires 540 questions to be asked in the 90 days of beta - that will require an achievable 7 a day from now on.

To move onto 10 a day on average will require 15 questions a day to be asked for the rest of the beta

For just over 15 questions a day to be averaged 25-30 questions will need to be asked every day to the end of the beta.

Unless things radically change I don't see where 25 or so questions every day of the week will come from, this site is simply not going to get an 'excellent' score for questions asked - not unless the current users change their usage patterns drastically or new excited users suddenly appear.

But an 'Okay' metric for questions asked for this site is very achievable if a minimum of 7 questions are asked each day. The 50 questions on the front page were all asked in the last 9 days - so if everyone simply saw to it that the newest front page only contained questions asked in the last week then we would have 7 questions a day being asked.

To ask a bunch of people to come up with a new question every day is a bit much; but if 25 people agreed to ask a much more realistic 2 questions per week then one of the key metrics would move out of the danger zone. If we can't find 25 people prepared to commit something along those lines then perhaps the site was never going to work anyway.

In PM terms we are behind schedule and need to consider de-scoping aspects of the project to hit the deadline (which the client says is immoveable).

I don't think PM-SE will finish public beta with five 'excellent' metrics - but if the three worrying measures move into 'Okay' the site might yet survive.

Can we improve the questions metric and will that get an acceptable mix of Okay and Excellent for the five metrics before the 90 days are up?

Answer 1

Please refer to Robert Cartaino's Answer On How To Make PMSE Win.

In order for this site to move out of beta, it must grow organically. The only sustainable way to increase the number of questions per day is to get more traffic from search engines. You can help by spreading interesting questions and interesting topics to people in your network, using your social networking tools.

If you have a blog that gets good traffic and that relates to project management, you can pick certain questions, use those as topics for your blog articles, and then include a link to the PMSE question.

If we ask 25 people to post 7 questions per day, or 10 questions per day, or 20 questions per day, we would simply be covering up the symptoms of a much bigger problem. Eventually, those 25 people will run out of questions to ask. Not only will we then be back to square one, but we'll also have a front page filled with potentially poor questions.

To make this site succeed, let's focus on the Publicist, Booster, and Announcer badges. If you can earn these badges, then you will have significantly helped this site grow in a way that will sustain for the lifetime of the site.