Our site is among the strongest to enter Public Beta in the last several years, but there is a lot of work to be done. There might never be a better time than now, to help make this site a huge success.
Below are some things you can do now that would greatly benefit the site. Feel free to take on any of the these tasks, and when you have you could perhaps write an answer here (and/or in the relevant linked post), which I'm sure would be upvoted in appreciation for your help!
Advertising
- We need a logo for community ads
- Our best logo can then replace the existing "Science SEs" advertisement on the following Science Meta pages:
- We can also replace our Community Promotion Ad in the following places:
- Physics Community Promotion Ads
- Software Engineering Community Promotion Ads
- Computational Science Community Promotion Ads
- Electrical Engineering Community Promotion Ads
- Theoretical Computer Science Community Promotion Ads
- Graphics Design Community Promotion Ads
- Mechanics Community Promotion Ads
- Signal Processing Community Promotion Ads
- Computer Science Community Promotion Ads
- Software Recommendations Community Promotion Ads
- Data Science Community Promotion Ads
- Cross Validated Community Promotion Ads
- We can also place a Community Promotion Ad on other sites if people have suggestions.
You can use the template below to edit the ads on any SE:
[![Common topics on Matter Modeling SE][1]][2]
[1]: https://i.sstatic.net/GVzhj.png
[2]: https://mattermodeling.stackexchange.com/
- We can also add the "Science stack exchange helping other science stack exchanges" add to the following:
- Space Meta (they are advertised on all of the above already, they might be welcoming).
- Operations Research Meta (they are advertised in some of the above already).
- Robotics Meta (they are advertised in all of the above already).
- Artificial Intelligence Meta (edit 60 of the Physics ad shows they were advertised there).
- CompSci Meta (edit 49 of the Physics ad shows they were advertised there).
- Data Science Meta (edit 40 of the Physics ad shows they were advertised there).
- Sustainable Living Meta (edit 17 of the Physics ad shows they were advertised there).
- Cognitive Science Meta (edit 2 of the Physics ad shows they were advertised there).
- Biology Meta (edit 1 of the Physics ad shows they were advertised there).
- Psychology Meta (edit 1 of the Physics ad shows that an earlier Psychology site was advertised there).
- Bioinformatics Meta (they don't yet have the generic ad that the above sites have, but they are still in Beta so they would benefit from the help).
- Economics Meta (they don't yet have the generic ad that the above sites have, but they are still in Beta so they would benefit from the help).
- Computer Science Meta (they graduated before the original Physics ad was made).
- Cross Validated Meta (they graduated before the original Physics ad was made).
- Theoretical Computer Science (they graduated before the original Physics ad was made).
- We can also put a free Community Promotion Ad on PhysicsOverflow.
- Site proposals were made for Materials Modeling and related topics in the past and we can reach out to supporters of those failed proposals to make them aware that the idea has finally succeeded.
Community Projects
- If we want a custom design or extra financial support, we can reach out to our potential sponsors. We might find that some of the tasks in this list which people here might find too tedious to do (like creating a logo or advertising) become easier when there's a large company supporting our initiative.
- Create a chat room that has feeds for whenever people ask relevant questions on other sites. Add feeds that you think will be of general interest
- There is a Community Bounty Board which can be used to encourage people to answer questions (so far it has only been Tyberius and I that have offered bounties there).
- Salvaging the DFT questions and questions that fall unambiguously within our territory, from other sites
- If someone would like to create a bot which posts a message in chat every 14 days, it would help to keep our chat rooms open.
Meeting our targets
Our answers-to-questions ratio is currently at 1.7 and we would like to get it to 2.5 within our first 90 days of Beta. The following questions can have multiple answers, and I could easily write many of them, but I do not want to start a trend of writing several answers of the same question:
- What are the common acronyms in Materials Modelling? (Add a similar answer for basis sets, functionals, types of SCF, types of DFT, etc.)
- What are some recent developments in density functional theory? (Add other milestone developments of DFT such as density-corrected DFT, DFTB, dispersion-corrected DFT, etc.)
- Semi-empirical software for bands calculations (Add a similar answer for other software)
- Methods for visualising aromaticity (Add a similar answer for other software)
- Is there any software that is optimized specifically for QM/MM? (Add a similar answer for other software)
- What are the main computational frameworks used in materials modeling? (Add MD, Quantum Dynamics, etc.)
- What are typical RPA capabilities of plane-wave codes? (There's no answers yet! Any software that can do RPA can be listed here!)
- What programs can do electron integrals and SCF calculations with more than one CPU? (Only 3 programs have been listed, more exist though!)
- What significant matter modelling methods are implemented in commercial software, for which there is no freeware alternative? (**It should be possible to add plenty of answers here!)
- Alternatives to VEDA 4 vibrational energy distribution analysis software? (There's no answers yet! I'm sure there could be many!)
Only 88% of our questions are answered at this time. It would be nice to have this reach 90% within our first 90 days of Beta. Users who come here with a question, are likely to come back if their question actually gets answered! Many of our un-answered questions seem reasonably easy to answer if we make the relevant experts aware of them. It would help if we could have some people help spread the word to get those questions answered!
Community Specific Guidelines
- We can set our own guidelines for voting, closing, deletion, etc. (in addition to the guidelines that are network-wide).
- We can create a Bill of Rights, like PhysicsOverflow has.
Community Feedback
- Construct a survey to find out what our community feels we need most to do and what where we do not need to waste focus (e.g. attacking low-quality questions vs clearing up unanswered queue, how often do you use chat, do you think we have too many chat rooms, etc.).
