There's a lot here. I'll try to hit most of your comments.
We can't really compete with The Workplace. This community is way bigger than ours and also established. Because the workplace is a kind of a community, too, we can't compete with them. They get questions because they have more experts over there. Our scope crosses with theirs so that many users are unsure where to ask and simply prefer to ask on The Workplace. The rate to get a qualified answer is higher since there are more users.
I'm not active on Workplace, though I have visited it many times via the Hot Questions posts that appear on the sidebar. The questions have been interesting and educational. One thing I've noticed in those questions (and after a quick glance through their tour) is that they focus on issues within the professional environment, not on building communities. There are certainly areas that could overlap, especially with one of the items in our scope being:
Questions about both online and offline communities
"Communities" is very broad. I live in a community. I work in a different community. Within the work community their are various sub communities (IT, HR, Marketing, Engineering, etc. etc.) and within those there are even more sub communities (Engineers for valve mechanisms on an engine, engineers for fuel pumps, engineers for the entire engine product, Software developers, Server administrators, database administrators, etc. etc.). I have recreational activities in several communities.
"Communities" are groups of people that a feel connected to one another, because of common circumstances (work, same activity, similar geographic dwelling) and similar outlooks (let's all not get fired today, let's all go ride our bikes on Saturday, it seems odd that these last few years the river has been flooding our streets in April let's do something about it). The "Work" community is the area that I see an overlap possibly occurring.
Despite this small amount of overlap, I do not think Community Building could just be absorbed into Workplace and fit in. So much more of our content is about building these communities or managing these communities.
Well, most people come to SE to discuss about their subject. Community Building is on the rise, nevertheless not a real subject yet. [...] Community Building isn't recognized as a real topic that matters.
"Yet" is hopefully the key word. The field is growing. The ultimate goal would be to lay down the ground work now to attract those new community leaders that get hired in the coming years. To do that, we definitely need the content though.
Most problems can be discussed on the particular site itself by starting a discussion on Meta. There's no need to ask us since everything can be solved on the site itself.
Perhaps we can use this to our advantage though. Certain types of situations are relatively uncommon on Stack Exchange. When they pop up on a child-meta they are dealt with there and then mostly fade away. The reason I say that is because child metas are more rarely visited by drive by users. Those that DO visit, probably don't search as frequently for an obscure topic. Thus, that information fades until an "old timer" brings it back up or a moderator on another site has an issue that triggers a memory of some even from years ago.
Why don't we encourage generic versions of Meta drama to be questions here? An exact copy/paste of a Meta question wouldn't be appropriate (to specific to a single site or group of people), but we can boil it down to a generic version of events. One generic question that we've had since almost the beginning is about how to handle minority opinions so they aren't stomped out by the majority.
Other questions are common across child metas. Are the answers different on each? Perhaps (seriously, I don't know, I haven't wandered through all 130+ metas). But, if it's a common questions on the child metas, it's probably a common question in the community building world at large. Where is our copy of the question?
Although we have a limited audience on StackExchange itself, we didn't think about the opportunity to promote us on bigger sites like the mentioned subreddit. We are deeply focused on SE.
Yes we are. I agree that this is a flaw. Some non-spammy name dropping around the larger communities wouldn't hurt things around here. We've had discussions about the Stack Exchange bias and about encouraging questions about other networks. My take away from those is that more questions related to more types of communities is a good thing.
Then there's something that made me a little bit upset. A few days ago, @Phillip asked a question. He asked about a theoretical community. It was put on hold because it was too broad on the first sight. I decided to write a comment to point out the necessary points I'm interested in. He answered those and I voted to reopen that question again because I had enough information to give an answer. However, it disappeared then. I don't know if it was removed by himself or by moderators. But in both cases: Why did that even happen?
The user deleted the question almost exactly 24 hours after making edits based on your comment. Moderator involvement in the deletion didn't occur. I did cast the last close vote about 3 hours before the question was edited to include more information. It was put on hold two days after it was asked and one day after your comments for clarification. It was closed as unclear. The original question was very broad.
The item entered the reopen queue. From there it was voted on and the consensus was to leave it closed.
Should we try to get out of this, or let it hang there a little bit longer to see what it brings? Are we okay with the low rate of contribution or are we not?
I am all for more quality questions. Recruiting new members is important, but if I learned anything from April Fools day this year it's that you need the quality questions to get quality answers to get quality users.
What can we, the small community that is here now, do to provide quality questions? Those questions can be a springboard into other communities or may simply turn up in someone's Google search for the same issues. Our questions that have hit the Hot Questions list have drawn in traffic and answers from users around the network. My idea about wandering around the child metas may not be a bad idea.
