Not sure how many of you are aware of this phenomenon called Stack Overflow. A question-and-answer site built around programming has been hugely successful in building a strong community. It was so successful that the group behind Stack Overflow, has spawned two more sites based on the model. And wouldn’t you know that each have corresponding meta sites which discuss the details of their counterpart’s operation. (Confused? It gets better!)
Since their launch, each have grown and matured and have a found a very important itch to scratch. No, it wasn’t creating a programming helpdesk. They’ve found a model which can be repeated across an infinite number of topics. So they’ve automated the the core processes into a scaffold and built a self-organizing, self-spawning community called Area51.
