In a minority of the evaluations I've participated in, the evaluation has prompted some useful discussion -- maybe as meta posts directly on the evaluation post, or more likely as other meta posts (is this really within our scope? how can we improve that pattern in answers? are these the right tags? etc) or in chat. People can do that any time, of course, and often do, but sometimes the evaluation kick-starts it. That's good -- but it's also a minority of the cases. Most of the time it's as you say -- a few people try to do the review, maybe getting hung up on the requirements ("how does this fare in Google?" always hinders me), but mostly a stats post gets made and people don't really discuss it.

I think the introspection is important, and there's a lot of variation in how much of this communities do on their own. So we should do something, but not this.

How about having a set of questions, or categories of question, that should be asked at various stages in a site's development? You have the "7 essential questions" of early beta, so maybe something like that but less prescriptive. Make it milestone-based, not time-based (mostly), because every site is different. And here's where I wave my hands a little because I don't have metrics, but something like this: What questions should sites be asking themselves around the time they get question #500? #2000? The first Deputy badge? 200 active users ("active" to be defined)? 500? Five users at over 4k rep? 50 total hot network questions? 200 completed first-post reviews? 500 completed VLQ reviews? Two years in beta?

When a site reaches a triggering milestone, or when it's been "a while" (TBD) since the last activity of this sort, perhaps the moderators could receive a notification -- "hey, you reached such-and-such milestone, this might be a good time to talk about X if you aren't already, here's a template for a possible meta post (if you want it to come from a CM just ask)". And let the moderators take it from there. Their users might already be handling all this just fine, but if not, this can be a useful, no-obligation, help.

The problem I have had with Community Evaluations is, in part, what you state: they don't seem to generate much discussion.

But it's more than that, and it may be in fact the reason for the lack of discussion: the evaluations didn't seem very actionable. (Maybe that's what "Unclear Goals" is intended to mean?) That's really part of the problem, I think, with longer-lived but still small beta sites in general: it's very unclear what actions can be taken to improve the site's size/quality/et cetera, and something like a Community Evaluation didn't help.

Think of it as a review at work.

A bad review:

• Lists the things you did last year
• Grades those things
• With an inconsistent and/or hidden set of standards

A good review:

• Gives examples of behaviors, not just "things"
• Points to what can/should be done to improve
• Has consistent and fully disclosed standards

Community evals were much closer to the former: a bunch of evaluations, each of us with different standards undoubtedly, and no clear 'actions' to improve - that's left to the reader to figure out.

So, what's actionable in this answer?

What would be useful, in my opinion, would be something a bit more focused on improvements in the community.

I don't think there's a way to do this without some involvement from SE staff, though, or else some people who actually know how to grow a community. When you think about our sites that are in the middle - sites with potential to grow, but also sites that aren't actually there yet, and have been not actually there yet for a while - I bet you find a lot of people passionate about their sites and their topics of interest, but aren't specialists in community development. That's the thing: we all have opinions as to what can be done, but between a lack of time and a lack of actual knowledge, it's very hard to get things going.

That's where SE's community managers come in. They know something about community development, and can be a useful neutral observer to point out the flaws and point out things that can be done that perhaps don't appear obvious to users. Sites see them occasionally, and the attention is often very beneficial. Obviously there's not an unlimited number of CMs, and they have their own time constraints - but I think a limited amount of involvement can help here.

The Community Evaluation might be useful as a starting point to start those discussions - maybe a mechanical turk approach, asking us to find similar posts on other sites, for example - but I think the discussions need someone like a CM to start it, and provide some feedback.

If CMs don't really have time to do this on a practical level for the many beta sites that undoubtedly need the help, perhaps users who do know something about community development (and we have lots of those too) can volunteer to help with other sites, and then moderators of beta sites can put their site on a queue to get the help of those volunteers?

I don't find the existing evaluation process useful at all.

For the purpose of introspection, I would find a "guest view" of the site useful. What does the site looks like from the outside? What do the people with no relation to the Stack Exchange network look for when they land there, and what do they find?

So, I propose a different automatic process:

1. Once in 3 months, post the list of 20 questions with age between 3 and 6 months that got the most visits from search. The view counts are not useful for this, they are distorted by Hot Network Questions and favor clickbait titles.

2. Right there in the automatic meta post, provide anonymous feedback data for those questions and answers to them. (If there are several answers, it's enough to give stats for the one that has the most feedback).

3. Leave the rest to the community: they will ponder the results, and probably fix a post or two. This is not meant to make decisions about the fate of the site, but to encourage good housekeeping habits — something that's lacking in a few places around the network.

Notes:

In principle, (2) is already available, but only to those with mod tool access and to the tiny minority that uses Data Explorer. (1) is not currently available.

If visits from search are not available for technical reasons, pick the questions with the most feedback (total number of anonymous votes on the question and its answers).

The parameters in italic are tentative.

In their current state, these self-evaluations ask people to do work for no clear outcome. You start with a task-oriented queue to complete which ideally triggers multiple epiphanies to manifest in harmony on the meta site, leading to brilliance and actionable steps toward realistic goals. Maybe we weren't that optimistic about these when we rolled them out, but that's okay.

They don't work as intended.

What I like about these is:

• They prod the community to look at how other sites in the topic space are doing
• They could prod the community to look at what other sites in the topic space are doing

If we have a site about mayonnaise, we want it to be as good, or better, than any other site about mayonnaise. In only very rare occasions has a topic come together in questionable quality on our engine, and quality is something we shouldn't need robots to remind us to check. If quality tanks and goes unnoticed, we've got far bigger problems to solve.

There are all sorts of bias going into how people rate the random sampling of questions, but that doesn't matter nearly as much as the fact that the number of people participating in these is exceedingly small to begin with.

Let's keep this, but:

• Kill the 'rate our quality' queue altogether. People rate the quality of their content every day by voting. It's presumptuous of us to ask them to do it in this manner and the results aren't useful to us or them. In fact, when the results are overly critical, this exercise can be actively harmful as it leads to self-deprecation.

• Open a discussion instead asking people to take a look at the front page of their site, which is a better representation of the kinds of questions people are more likely to care about, and do some casual searching.

• Ask people to share their thoughts as an answer to the discussion. What are we good at? What could we change for the better? How's our relevance to the topic for the Internet at large? Is there anything in our way that we could change?

The value in the following discussion would be light years ahead of trying to figure out why people rated a random sampling of questions the way that they did. We turn this away from being a call to action to accomplish units of work and more into a "it's that time again, to gather together and talk about what we're doing."

Change the frequency to yearly. Anyone is welcome to open a meta discussion about the direction a site is headed at any time, and a year for this seems long enough for there to be enough new things to talk about.

Once modified, I don't see a reason to not run this on all of our sites. Asking folks to come together if only to say "Hey, are we still relevant?" is definitely not an exercise in futility.

Wait, there is a Site Self-Evaluation review queue?

Until reading your post, and going to a respective beta site, and looking on meta, and then reading the answer to look at the ratings, and then re-reading the post; only then out of this whole time did I realize there was a temporary review queue that gets opened for this process.

I literally had no clue before this. I am familiar with the overall exchange. I have over a thousand posts and visits. Apparently I have helped millions.

I treated the beta exchange just like any other exchange, visiting frequently even though the stream of questions was slow. I poked around a little but overall I expected the beta to have less features.

I would have used it... had I known

What I am getting at is there needs to be more exposure to this evaluation process. Simply posting it on the meta of sites with low traffic and opening a queue for a week seems to be rather in the shadows. I believe this can be seen by the amount of feedback (it is rather low).

Having been just now exposed to this process and having a fresh perspective on it, these are some of my first reactions.

Has this been tried on SO for example to get an idea of what a massive site looks like?

How was the 7 day window chosen?

Why is it a baseline 10 questions regardless of size?

What type of criteria is used to select the random questions?

They are not meant to be overly critical, they are just what first come to mind about the process.

I really like the nuance that the beta sites contain. It is an interesting place to see the model of Stack Exchange being applied. I feel that most people who participate in beta sites feel similarly and want them to succeed.

Notify me of the review queue

As a result of that inclination, I believe that it would make sense to ping every active user over the past quarter for their respective beta in their notification inbox with a link to the site evaluation review queue.

These users want to interact with the site, but sometimes when there aren't many questions it can be difficult to have interactions. Giving them a notification of the evaluation review queue in their inbox will allow them an opportunity to interact with the beta site.

For example, the most recent evaluation on beer beta only had 8 reviewers (unless some had skipped which was unlikely, max 10 if some skipped). Yet that quarter saw 288 different users obtain at least some reputation gain. Notifying these 288 users of the review queue would not only have provided a higher value for your testing statistics, but it also would have driven traffic to the site.

tmd;dr; (too much drivel; didn't read) I didn't know until now there was an actual review queue for these. I have seen the posts but never clicked every link to find the queue. I don't think these should be given up on just yet because there is room to improve - specifically in the form of notifying involved users of the existence of the review queue's status when available.

The introspection itself, and the inclusion of the users in that process, I consider fairly useful—as long as you get participation.

What I like about the current, automated self-evaluations:

1. The fact that they're scheduled means community members don't have to think about introducing a "call to action" themselves (nor do pro tems) to get it happening.
2. Random samples are great. Users need to come out of their SME corners to get an idea of the site's overall value (and challenges).
3. Looking back at questions in the self-evaluation is a lot less charged than evaluating them when they first come in. Everyone's got less skin in the game, and you get the benefit of hindsight, which maybe prompts users who participate to start thinking more long-term about questions as they come in.

What I don't like:

1. The fact that they're posted by the Community user makes them trivial to ignore. Somewhat paradoxically, there's extra friction involved in sending your opinions out into empty space.
2. I know Meta is a horrifying monstrosity, but site eval threads are particularly ugly; they're cluttered, they age poorly, it's hard to have separable discussions and voting ends up being counter-productive.
3. Ten questions is too small a random sample.
4. Some questions just aren't that important. I don't want to be distracted by some troubleshooting question that got seven views and is just intrinsically not searchable. Sometimes I wish I could mulligan the random sample...

If we accept that this approach to introspection is very useful (TBD!) then I think we should grab a larger sample; the less practical it becomes to enter the discussion with a play-by-play of every item on the list, the more likely users are to focus on the big picture when answering.

When users just list their thoughts on each question from the queue in their answers, those thoughts aren't separable. A great point about a single question can get hidden in the middle of a bunch of forgettable running commentary. Better for them to use the eval thread as a place to synthesize a conclusion rather than pick nits about each item.

An even stronger nudge in this direction might involve hacking together a way to comment on review items within the self-eval queue without having those comments show up on the post itself, leaving the Meta thread for tl;dr and Big Ideas.

As already stated in HDE 226868’s answer, a bunch of random questions is very unlikely to spark any constructive discussion.

So, a naïve thought would be to hold regular community surveys, asking questions like: “Are we closing too many questions?”, “Are we friendly to newcomers?”, “What policy should we change?” and so on. But without any examples, a lot of people will just select the most neutral option and it does not help you to identfy issues and similar.

Thinking a bit further, one would need specialised surveys with selected examples. For instance, show people a few closed questions whose on-topicness was disputed (i.e., a considerable number of leave open or reopen votes) and ask what they think about them. Next months, something similar with unanswered questions. This might be worth trying but it can only capture issues that are known to affect many sites.

For individual issues, you need classical Meta posts again: Somebody identifies a potential issue, collects a few exemplary posts and asks a Meta question about them. But then – and now we come full circle – how to spark these? I can only see one solution: Make per-site-metas more attractive, e.g., by informing users about votes. Stack Exchange lives from gamification, but per-site-metas are somewhat excempt from this.

Summary

• Pretty much kill them . . .
• . . . but make these optional, suggesting something like the Real Essential Questions of Every Beta. Let the communities choose everything else.

Suggestions

One idea I had would be to completely cut out the statistics "answer". Stop having people rank the questions in the queue. Just show them 10 random questions - change them for each person, perhaps - and encourage them to write up an answer to a meta post if (and only if) they notice anything useful. That's the nicest suggestion I have if the Evaluations are kept around (which they won't be).

Huh, that kind of sounds like typical meta activity: A user notices something interesting that needs to be discussed and brings it up on meta. So even this bit of the Evaluations doesn't add anything.

The only possible issue is that there aren't a lot of these "big picture" questions on a meta. There's typically not a lot of introspection.

This brings me to the second part . . .

Is this sort of forced introspection even needed anymore?

Yes. Sort of. But not forced. And there needs to be a better way. . .

Let's delegate this kind of thing to the members of each site as a whole.

Cut out the idea that this kind of thing is periodic. (I link to Grace Note's answer purely to link to official policy) There's no reason why, say, Aviation should need an evaluation in Month 1 and not Month 2. Let the people of each site choose when they want to be introspective.

If people think that there needs to be deeper introspection, then let them have it. But if they think that all is well, then, hold off. It would be a waste of everyone's time.

As for the format of this, just have people look around and see what issues they find. Post answers on a meta question, or post separate meta questions for each issue. Cut the queue and the rankings. Have a Site Self-Evaluation be as informal as it can be - simply a period of time where everyone agrees to dig something up. That's all. Perhaps have the mods set up a few canonical meta posts about different topics, but that's it. Period. Let the people choose.

So, there should be an official evaluation that each site chooses to have, but everything about it is up to them to decide. Maybe SE should suggest a few meta posts to have - like the Real Essential Questions of Every Beta - but that's it.

Being a pro-tem moderator on a beta site where there is no "standard" review process (neither Code Review nor Programming Puzzles and Code Golf have them), I can hardly claim to be an expert on them. What I can say, is that on Code Review we have had a number of self-introspections and as a community we have rallied and improved as a result.

These introspections have been the result of feedback from "manual" evaluations from the CM's that were performed in "secret" and then announced to us. That review, for example, inspired this response: We're on a mission!.

The efforts resulting from that "mission" have more than doubled the activity on the site, removed a number of warning signs, and then later resulted in the announcement that at some point, the site will "graduate".

It is clear that introspection can be beneficial, but it is also clear that it does not need to be triggered by the automated/review system.

Similarly, a number of sites have repeatedly seen clean bills of health from the self-review system, but have no indication that they are ready for "graduation" either.

The promotion from a beta site to a full site can be influenced by a number of factors, one of them is the self-review, but, in the long run, it is not used in a deterministic way by the CM's when considering a site promotion, it is just one of many factors that are considered, and, even when considered, it is not necessarily even treated as a go/no-go barrier. Sites with low participation or unflattering self-reviews have been promoted anyway.

The best value that I can see from a site review is a trigger for further introspection and discussion. Let's face it, 10 questions on a decent beta site with a few thousand questions per year, is not exactly a good sample. It is not a tool that is particularly useful for more than that. More interesting than the actual evaluation would be the participation in the evaluation, how enthusiastic and engaged the community is in the process.

Bottom line, is a site that has an active and invested community is probably going to have a good evaluation anyway, and a site that does not have that community, probably does not have a great review regardless.

Having "looked around" at various beta-site self evaluations, there does not appear to be much in the way of discussion or follow-up on the evaluations. They do not change anything....

Recently promoted sites:

• Blender: - no dicussion Let's get critical: Feb 2015 Site Self-Evaluation
• Network Engineering - no discussion: Let's get critical: Feb 2015 Site Self-Evaluation
• Chemistry - no discussion: Let's get critical: Feb 2015 Site Self-Evaluation
• Biology - little discussion: Let's get critical: Apr 2015 Site Self-Evaluation

Stable but not promoted sites:

• ELL - some discussion: Let's get critical: Mar 2015 Site Self-Evaluation
• Anime - some discussion: https://anime.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2254/lets-get-critical-feb-2015-site-self-evaluation

New Sites:

• Emacs - Moderate discussion, double-particpation: https://emacs.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/284/lets-get-critical-apr-2015-site-self-evaluation
• Data Science - No discussion, low participation: https://datascience.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2158/lets-get-critical-jun-2015-site-self-evaluation
• Community Building - good discussion, low participation: https://communitybuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1246/lets-get-critical-feb-2015-site-self-evaluation

In all, I would suggest that participation is very low on the evaluations. 30-or-so people responding to 10 random questions on sites with thousands of members is hardly useful. The resulting participation in discussions is also.... disappointing.

Bottom line is that the review process does little to promote any meaningful discussion, it provides marginal value in terms of any objective numbers, and the results are not used systematically by the CM's anyway.

There is no reason to continue with them other than to reinforce that participation in the meta-aspects of the site is low.

Further, in my experience, there are other, better ways to encourage community growth and question and answer quality, and those other ways rely on community engagement and standards, and those are things which cause good reviews, and are not caused by auto-reviews.

On a podcast after manual site evaluations started (around the 8:40 mark), Robert asked:

What if we just literally let [small sites] exist forever? What does that do in terms of making the internet a better place?

This is the situation we are now in. Since we keep launching more and rarely close sites down, monitoring represents a scaling problem for Community Managers. Automated self-evaluations solve the scaling problem by, in theory, asking the community to do the heavy lifting of comparing the site's questions to other pages on the internet. Unfortunately, our current system is needlessly complex.

So I'd like to propose the following changes:

1. Select 5 questions instead of 10. Part of the problem I have with these evaluation is that it just takes a long time to look at so many questions. Cutting the number in half hurts the sample, but also makes the task less daunting. We might even go back to quarterly evaluations if sample size is a concern.

2. Don't separate the review from the writeup. I enjoyed going through questions in the review queue, but I kinda wanted to be able to write something when I first evaluated the page. But instead, I had to wait for the review to end and the results to be posted. Instead, I'd like to post the sample and encourage people to post their analysis immediately.

3. Don't use numbers that lack meaning. It was great to look at the statistics at the end of an evaluation until I discovered that every user has an incompatible model of what the ratings mean. Numeric results require some sort of objective criteria to ground any post analysis.

4. Assume we have good SEO. One of the remarkable things I discovered when doing these evaluations was that Google loves to provide our pages as search results. That might not be true forever, but for now it doesn't make a lot of sense to ask users to go through the exercise of searching for the page on our site. Rather, I think it's helpful to ask users to search for competing answers that are better than the ones on the Stack Exchange site.

5. Provide some objective measure of how well the page was received by regular users and anonymous visitors. Often both groups have similar opinions, but it can be revealing when they differ.

In order to test these ideas, I've posted a test on meta.Aviation.

I will not be at all sorry to see the Community/Site Evaluation process shut down because I perceived little value in them on a site I moderate: Let's get critical: Feb 2015 Site Self-Evaluation

I think whatever replaces it should be kept very simple.

I think a very useful set of metrics for sites to aspire to is already available in Area 51 and we should do more with them.

I would prefer to see per site Meta discussions, with community manager input to get more cross site perspective, on simple questions like:

• Why are our questions per day very low?
• Why are our 200+ rep user numbers low?
• Why are our answers per question low?
• Why are our visits per day low?

and be prepared to congratulate ourselves when metrics are looking good:

• Why we stay well into the 90s for percentage questions answered?
• How do we keep our 2,000+ and 3,000+ rep users engaged and keen?

If there are any better metrics that come to light then by all means add a couple more into the mix for discussion.

The questions are rather useless, as it currently stands. It might be better to have some kind of a survey instead. For instance, the following types of things might be of interest:

1. How many questions have you searched this site for in the last month?
2. Do you find the quality of questions to be high?

Some questions need to be qualitative as well, such as:

1. What do you think the single best thing of this site is?
2. How do you think we can improve?

These qualitative answers would be posted.

Asking some questions like that, and providing all of the information could be a useful way to gather information from a wider audience. Maybe do it once a quarter, and send out a notice to those people who frequent the site to make sure and take part would be nice as well.

How about having others judge your site?

Beta-sites each could judge the quality of questions and answers for other sites, but not pair wise, such the possibility of quid-pro-quo doesn't even arise.

Yes, you potentially can't judge whether answers (and to some extend) questions make sense, but that's not the point. Look at whether they're structured well, comments are not answers, answers are not comments, etc.

With the old system, I usually found the sample rather unsatisfying. Here is one idea on how to

• make people read questions they can say something about,
• make it clear their input/action is valuable, and
• may improve site quality.

Introspection can be gained by tracking what users do in response to what I propose.

So, here's the idea. Every day (week, month, ...) send every active¹ user a notification with a question link, asking them to review the post and then edit, vote and answer (if possible). Draw this question randomly from the pool of questions in tags this user likes which probably need attention (few views and votes, no upvoted answers).

1. They should have high enough rep to do all the community moderation, and should have visited the site in the last interval.

I never liked the self evaluation because I found myself rating my own answers. It's very difficult to be totally neutral about your own answer.

I also found it hard to use suggested methodology of doing a google search and comparing the answers. Content farms have a lot of answers but you could write a small essay about why those answers might be technically correct but lacking in references or disclaimers about where the answer applies.