We have an amazing opportunity to migrate Social Sound Design to the Stack Exchange Network. This means brand new and up-to-date software with lots of great features (including chat and a meta site!). Best of all, we'll be part of a massive ecosystem of knowledge. Hurray!
Ever since starting my journey into the world of sound design, I've dreamed of having a space dedicated to all the wonderful disciplines of sound design where we can learn from and share our knowledge with a community of like-minded folk. I feel incredibly lucky that SSD has become what it is. Thanks to all of you for making it so awesome!
A bit of background and context
4 years ago, I discovered a Q&A platform called Stack Exchange (SE), which embodied exactly the ethos I was looking for and used it to build SSD. Since then, the Stack Exchange platform became the amazing and almighty Stack Exchange Network, which is the home to over 100 high quality Q&A sites covering most of the topics you could dream of. But to be part of the switch from SE 1.0 (subscription-based model) to SE 2.0 (Network), we would have had to start again from the beginning, and I decided we were better off to keep building up the community independently of the "Area 51" process they have. Our community has been so strong and the quality of the questions so high that they let us do our thing for a lot longer than anticipated and kept the server running for us (thank you, SE!). But now, it's time to join the SE Network!
We're joining forces with another awesome SE site!
To make this happen, we will be joining forces with a SE site called Audio-Video Production (AVP). They also have a really great community with quality Q&As. Not only will we be combining the 3,600+ questions from SSD with 2,500+ questions from AVP but also both communities! This is going to bring this site to a whole new level. Both sites are reaching out to the same audience, so our combined strength will be a great asset to this subject!
You may be asking why is "video" part of this? It's not. The audio and video part of AVP will separate from one another and the video community will take over the video part where they will focus on creating a site dedicated to video professionals and experts. There are a few isolated audio-video crossover questions, but it shouldn't be hard to work them out during the move. So if you ever have video-related questions, be sure to join them as well :-)
So how is this going to work?
Step 1: Don't panic — We're going to start by moving SSD over to the 2.0 Network software as Sound Design. We will be new neighbors to AVP for awhile while we work through some of the technical issues and we get acclimated to our new home. This will provide a gentle introduction; be sure to bake a pie and greet our new neighbors! A bit after that, the audio part of AVP will be merged with us.
After a short cleanup, we'll start hashing out the migration issues (content, tags, cleanup, etc). We're 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. To separate the audio and video content on the AVP site, we'll use the audio-specific tags to automate a lot of the heavy moving; but after that, the regular migration tools will be used so the community can carefully and methodically manage the remaining content however we 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.
There was another SE 1.0 site called Math Overflow, which was in a similar situation to us and it was very successfully migrated. The tech team over at SE are already familiar with the technical issues that may arise from this process, so the move should hopefully be as seamless as possible.
Stay tuned; we'll keep the updates coming.
