Let's migrate content from Technical Communication here

Question

The Technical Communication site is not going to graduate from private beta due to not meeting the participation threshold. However, there are some good people and some good content in the private beta site, most of which would be on topic for us. We have the opportunity to migrate most of that content here, and hopefully bring a lot of the users as well.

However, it won't happen automatically. Per the discussion in this meta post on Technical Communication (https://techcomm.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/67/closure-notice-unfortunately-techcomm-se-will-not-advance-from-private-beta) doing a migration like this is not standard practice on Stack Exchange and if we want it we have to ask for it and come up with a plan to handle it intelligently.

Why would we want to? For a long time we have been trying to get Writers out of its rut so we could move toward graduation and become a full fledged site. (Getting Writers out of its Rut). A big part of the problem that we have been trying to address with recent changes, including the change of name from Writers to Writing is to broaden the range of topics we cover so that we can actually fulfill our mandate of handling the full spectrum of writing questions. A big part of that is looking more like a place to ask other kinds of writing questions. An influx of tech writing questions, along with the people who ask and answer them, could go a long way to making us look like a site where all kinds of writing questions will find good answers.

So what do you say? Do we want to migrate the questions and users from technical communication over here? And if so, what guidelines should we establish for migrating questions and what can we do to ensure the migration goes smoothly?

Answer 1

Yes, I agree -- there is good content on that site that would also fit here, so we should help them move it here if they want. Some questions don't fit here; they do have some questions that are about verbal technical communication rather than writing, and some others that might not match up with our scope. But there's a lot that does fit, and there aren't so many questions that reviewing the list would be a chore.

As Robert Cartaino said in a comment there, we should do this thoughtfully and consensually. We probably wouldn't want to pull questions that are closed or that are downvoted, for example. Some, as I said, would be off-topic here. The community there is already starting to identify questions they propose moving here. Let's let compiling a list of candidates happen there, and then we can take a quick look to make sure we agree on the list. That way, we can show SE that both sites agree, but we don't split the discussion of which questions between the two sites. Implementation note: we have one week to get this done.

We can't migrate users; that's completely up to the users in question. However, all they have to do is come here and click the "join" button and they'll be automatically associated with whatever content of theirs was migrated.

Update: The Tech Comm community has compiled a list of questions to migrate. You'll need to visit the private beta from Area 51 to see them.