Stack Exchange participation drive ideas

Question

Here at the Institute for Quantum Computing, some other students and I will be having an SE participation drive (thanks for the support SE) on January 25th (likely). We will be doing the following:

1. One month contest for: most reputation, best question, best answer.
2. Live introduction and demonstration of the site.

One idea I had for a demonstration was to have questions and answers prepared. It would be great if either of these was provided by someone "out there" in the internets as opposed to me asking and answering my own question during the demo. Also, if people are interesting in voting up these questions "live", that would be useful as well, I think.

Comments / questions / suggestions?

This particular event has passed (and went rather well, I think) but I will leave this question here for suggestions on future events.

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Comments

you might also want to consider posting a bad question to demonstrate what happens to noise

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I'm curious to know how you got those other students interested in the first place ;-) Pretty much every time I make an attempt at promoting an SE site it falls flat on its face.

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@TobiasKienzler - that is a great idea, thanks.

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@DavidZaslavsky - for students, it is easy: free food. SE will (generously!) sponsor such an event.

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Yeah, I guess... although I'm pretty sure most of my department is thoroughly sick of hearing about Stack Exchange and they may well not be willing to put up with it even in exchange for free food.

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I'm probably in the wrong time zone to be of much use, but if there is anything I can do to help you out, let me know.

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Answer 1

I'm likely seeing this too late to help with your event, but here's something I've found works well in a demo.

When I'm showing Stack Exchange to someone new for the first time, I prepare a question similar to one that already exists. So I start by talking a bit about the purpose of the site (focused Q&A, expert answers, etc.) and then go to ask my prepared question.

I type in my title, tab out of the title bar, and then explain how the system identifies questions that are similar to what I'm asking. The point being that the site may already have answers to the questions your potential new users have. This view is also a good time to explain accepted answers and a bit about voting, since the "Questions with Similar Titles" list shows some of that information about questions.

From there I sometimes talk a bit about community moderation and the privilege system, explain how a question can go on to help hundreds of people (and demo a question with high views to support this), and possibly give some statistics on how many questions have been answered. This may also be a good time to go into a more detailed explanation of the site's scope and show some example good questions.

If you're doing a one-on-one demo or if you're feeling brave otherwise, you can ask if the person/people you're demoing to have a question and then guide them through (optionally creating an account) and asking it.

Hope this helps.

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Comments

Thanks for the suggestions! The event happened a few days ago but we may do another in the future.

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