Update This is now happening, please read the linked meta post on Sound Design SE. If you do not have an account on Sound Design SE, please make one now.
We have an interesting opportunity to migrate the Social Sound Design site to the Stack Exchange Network. Many of you are already familiar with the work of SSD — It's is a very high-quality Q&A for sound engineers and artists built on the Stack Exchange platform (back from when we offered Stack Exchange as a subscription service).
I've been chatting with Andrew (founder of SSD) and the moderators of AVP, and we've all become very excited about the prospects of joining forces (SSD with 3,600+ questions, AVP with 2,500+ questions). But I guess we're far enough along that it's pretty safe to announce:
We are going to merge Social Sound Design with AVP SE!
This is going to bring this site to a whole new level. SSD has an expert/professional user base reaching deep into the artistic disciplines of sound design, while Stack Exchange's technical reach is hard to beat. But we are both reaching out to the same audience, so our combined strength will be a great asset to this subject!
But how does this help video?
One of our concerns was that all the new audio content would overwhelm the video community. Video is about 45% of this site; after the merge, that would fall to about 20%. But we've come up with a solution that we hope will ultimately benefit both parties.
Video will have its own dedicated site.
Technically we're actually migrating AVP audio to the combined site, so this presents a unique opportunity for the video community to take over so we can finally focus on creating a site dedicated to video professionals and experts! Yes, there are a few isolated audio-video crossover questions, but it shouldn't be hard to work them out during the move.
I realize this leaves the video site somewhat smaller (albeit, more focused on their subject); but with a renewed focus, I think we have a much better chance of attracting the audience we need. If the community has trouble taking off, we're here to offer whatever assistance you need.
So how is this going to work?
Step 1: Don't panic — We're going to start by moving SSD over to the network software as "Sound Design." SSD will be our new neighbors for awhile while we work through some of the technical issues and the SSD community gets acclimated to their new home. This will provide a gentle introduction; be sure to bake a pie and greet the new neighbors.
After a short cleanup, we'll start hashing out the migration issues (content, tags, cleanup, etc). SSD is already well attuned to the Stack Exchange way of doing things, so there shouldn't be any radical changes in scope or how things are done. We'll use the audio-specific tags to automate a lot of the heavy moving; but after that, we'll simply use the regular migration tools so the community can carefully and methodically manage the remaining content however you see fit. And all along, we'll be working behind the scenes to make sure nothing gets lost and we don't break anything on the Internet.
Once the activity starts to wane, we'll circle back and rebrand the Video Production site. The moderators are somewhat audio-centric, so we'll be keeping the AVP and SSD mods on audio and appointing new moderators for video.
We recently completed a successful migration of Math Overflow (another SE 1.0 site), so we're already somewhat familiar with the technical issues, but we'll do everything we can to make the move as seamless as possible.
Stay tuned; we'll keep the updates coming. Enjoy!
