For those who don't know me, I'm Grace Note, a Community Manager at Stack Exchange.
The Community Team has been looking at the Salesforce Private Beta over the course of the week, and we saw various good things. Question quality is pretty strong, people are voting, overall there's a measure of engagement in the users.
However, Salesforce doesn't yet have the volume of content we like to see when we move a site into public beta. The more great content a site has when it enters public beta, the easier it is to tackle content quality problems that may be introduced by an influx of new users. There's a large number of answers on the site, so there's definitely a lot of people willing to contribute. Let's see what we can do to get a lot more questions asked - everyone should see what they can add to our starting content base if they can.
Moreover, Meta is a bit low on the activity end. Meta is where you, the community, take charge of your own site - you determine policy, you work out disputes, you generally engage with your fellow members of the community to discuss what can and will make your site shine. An active, engaged meta community is essential to the success of a site. One of the better starting points is The 7 Essential Meta Questions of Every Beta, which outlines 7 basic but important topics that are vital to discuss throughout the site's lifetime, and which is important to get rolling early. Start from there, and then discussions should start rolling in here much more comfortably for the community.
This is by no means a warning or anything - a site will stay in Private Beta for a minimum of 7 days. Extensions happen pretty often, and we're aware that for a large part of the userbase, this is a learning experience as the first time running a Stack Exchange site. But a learning experience is more enriched by having someone to teach, and someone to guide. So, think of this as part of that guidance towards helping make the Salesforce site not only succeed, but excel.
