In the question on this site, "Will Chiphacker survive StackExchange 2.0?", the SO blog post here about the upgrade from SE 1.0 to 2.0 was brought up. That blog post has an FAQ at the bottom. The most important question in this situation is:
Q: What if a new, community-created site competes with my existing,
old-rules Stack Exchange?
If your
existing Stack Exchange site already
has developed a substantial community,
we’ll encourage people to go there,
rather than creating yet another Stack
Exchange on the same topic. Once
again, our goal is to make the
Internet a better place to get expert
answers to your questions. Competing
with existing sites that do a great
job of that is not in our mission.
However, if your Stack Exchange site
does not have substantial traffic, we
reserve the right to create a new site
on the same topic.
However, there's another blog post here about the migration process, and, as this question on meta.SO points out, includes the clause:
SE 1.0 sites owners[sic] meeting the
minimum criteria will have a choice:
- Continue for free under the same terms as SE 1.0 for as long as they
maintain the traffic levels.
- Migrate directly into SE 2.0 as a fully-fledged SE 2.0 site.
In answer to the question "Will Chiphacker survive StackExchange 2.0", Marcus/littlebirdceo got an email confirmation that we're an active site from Robert Carantio, the SE community coordinator, stating that we will continue to run in the same [manner] as we do now.
So, the question at this moment is which road Marcus wants to take. We can remain on SE 1.0, and continue to compete with Electronics Exchange and the new Area 51 site, which will be on SE 2.0, or we can become/merge with the new Area 51 site.
That's the situation. Now we/Marcus have to decide. I'm not sure if Marcus wants to maintain control over the site as a source of support for littlebird electronics customers, or if he's making money from ads, or if he wants to go with the popular vote - It's his decision in the end, and I don't want to step on his toes.
I don't want to give up the user and answer base we have here, but I'd like very much to move to the 2.0 platform so we can have continued support from the SE team. I don't think many of us are good enough web developers to maintain/upgrade the site better than they will, and I already miss some SE 2.0 features (Like URL markup in comments). I think that the commitments, the publicity, and the beta/meta processes associated with Area 51 would be good for the site, but I doubt that the call "Alright, everyone head over to Electronics and Robotics, the site will be closing down" will be well received. And, I like Electropus.
