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Community: Should there be a MO community site?

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    I was recently reading a Y-combinator discussion of MathOverflow, and while I'm far from agreement with many of the posters there, I was struck by the comment "A Q&A site is NOT a community site, a proper community site has discussions, sharing, along with some Q&A." I'd certainly never suggest that MathOverflow try to encompass this broader picture within the StackExchange framework, but one can see the beginnings of it in the hijacking of meta for distinctly non-meta purposes which happens from time to time.

    So I think it's worth asking: is there some way of setting up an adjoint website to MathOverflow which would serve as a landing pad for more "communitarian" bits of interaction, such as more discussion oriented questions, announcements, etc.? I'm not sure I have a real suggestion for a format; one possibility would be a community blog like Metafilter.

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    I really don't like the blog format for discussions. What would be nice is if we could split meta up into two separate meta forums, meta.MO and meta.community or something like that.

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    I think it comes down to a question of "Is there anyone with the motivation to set up and moderate such a site?". I think my interest would be limited to agreeing to point community.mathoverflow.net (e.g.) to some other IP address, but for that matter it's Anton who owns the domain name, and I'd be surprised if he's even that interested! We were actually talking today about "the future" of mathoverflow, and agreeing that "more of the same, but covering more areas of maths" was pretty much our aspiration. For me at least, the unix tool mantra "do one thing and do it well" seems the right approach to mathoverflow. Not to rain on the parade, but let's wait until someone has a concrete proposal that includes evidence of enthusiasm for running it!

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    I'd be interested in running it, but putting me on staff for anything will pretty much kill the whole thing. That is.. unless that's what you want to do.

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    Ben, if the people you refer to are so enthused by the idea let them try it. It shouldn't be up to the MO people to singlehandedly modernize all mathematical communication worldwide.
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    I remember people talking about perhaps using reddit for this at some point. I know that reddit.com/r/math is not at the same standard we are used to here, but we could always just open a new subreddit along the lines of reddit.com/r/mathoverflow, and move discussions and announcements there.

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    Incidentally, I've been working on getting the software behind this forum and also wordpress software working with MathML so if anyone is interested in setting up something "beyond MO" and would like to do the mathematics correctly (!), please feel free to contact me about how to set it up.

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    It might be a good place to celebrate MO milestones like the the 5000th question!

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    It might be a good place to celebrate MO milestones like the the 5000th question!

    !

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    There certainly has been a whack of new users recently -- of the career mathematician kind. That's been nice to see.

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