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There's clearly a lot of excitement and enthusiasm right now around the StackExchange network for Programming Language and Compilers. I think it would be nice if we could give people an outlet for turning that excitement into making cs.stackexchange the greatest possible web resource that it can be in the areas of Programming Languages and Compilers.

Stack Exchange provides the capability for a site to have a Community Event. This gets announced in the community bulletin (the box near the top of the right sidebar).

I don't know the exact parameters (hence this meta question) but it might be something like:

  • A specified week-long event (length up for discussion, perhaps only a day or two would be better?)
  • We'd encourage everyone involved to join in chat during the event.
  • Because it would be a special event it would give us a good opportunity to take to social media and invite our colleagues and friends who are experts in PL or compilers to join in the fun.
  • We could concentrate on things like
    • Asking (and answering) new questions specifically targeted at experts and researchers.
    • Editing existing questions and answers to turn them into the best possible resources.
    • Figuring out which questions get asked over and over, and edit one of each type into a great reference question.
    • Offering bounties for specifically chosen questions that need more attention.
    • Editing tag wikis to better explain what kinds of questions we do (and don't) expect to be associated with each tag.
    • Doing a lot of voting on the questions we are working on. (Perhaps some of them might even get on the "hot questions" list and attract some attention across the entire SE network.)
    • Plan future community events, and/or promotions, each better than the last.

Would you be interested in participating? If so, please suggest some good dates (we don't want to do this the week of a big conference submission deadline), and ways to improve the chances of success. (Change the scope, add or remove things to work on, ...?)

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    $\begingroup$ Brilliant! Depending on the time frame, I'm definitely on board, both as user (with whatever limited expertise I have) and mod (in case some powers are needed). Two notes: 1) If it goes on for longer than a day, the event should probably get its own chat room (along with a chat event). 2) Planing for several days is probably prudent since hard questions might take a while to digest. 3) For some of the items you list, a certain amount of preparation is in order, such as selecting questions and tags worthy of an overhaul. 4) Post a community ad on the sites the PLDI supporters hail from? $\endgroup$
    – Raphael Mod
    Oct 10, 2014 at 9:36
  • $\begingroup$ thx sincerely for your ongoing efforts/ interest/ enthusiasm in cs.se outreach/ publicity. really like idea of chat session but not even high rep/cs regulars show up in chat all that much (except for a handful of "long regulars"). predict it will be extremely difficult to draw in anyone from here or elsewhere unless some effective advertising mechanism is discovered (which so far doesnt seem to) $\endgroup$
    – vzn
    Oct 10, 2014 at 18:19

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