Defining the content of our site is important but we should let topics come to us and discuss them if necessary as they appear. It would be difficult for us to create content if we don't know that there's demand for it.
Instead, I feel that we should focus on curating the content of the site we have so that we can get this site started out well. If ignored - they tend to be things that get put off until "later" - they quickly become "unfixable".
These things include:
Focusing on good tagging practices.
Tags quickly turn into a quagmire from hell if they're not curated from the start. Let's figure out what practices we want to follow and be flexible if they need to change.
- As we've discussed elsewhere, should it be crocheting or crochet?
- When is a tag too broad - is tools going to be useful or would knives, paintbrushes, crochet-hooks be better?
- Prevent users from going tag-crazy during the closed beta phase and make an effort to limit tags used on questions to those that actually relate to the question - a question about the differences between knitting, crochet and Tunisian crochet is not really about yarn even though all three utilize yarn.
Discussions like this should be brought up in a neutral way on meta on an individual basis whenever someone has a question about tagging.
Editing questions for readability and clarity.
Let's find a standard that works for us. Personally, I don't like questions that use "title case", so I like to edit them to make them in standard case.
Close questions that don't fit the SE model if they can't be "fixed".
Yes, it's extremely tempting to save every question but this phase of our site is about making certain we're getting a good start and allowing overly subjective questions, questions that don't fit our scope, or any other type of problem question is a very important part of that process.
Vote
This should be higher up the list, really, but voting is extremely important for morale and to help us get users who can actually help moderate the site. We have the CMs doing a lot of the background stuff for us right now and we'll eventually get some mods of our own... but we need to get users rep and the only way to do that is to vote.
That being said, don't be afraid to downvote. Remember that the downvote is a powerful tool and is an important part of this process. It's not "mean"... it's necessary.
Ask good questions and write good answers.
Remember to show your work. One sentence is rarely sufficient to ask or answer a question. We need as much information as we can get to really be sure that our quality is high.
Use comments as comments, not answers!
If you need more information from the asker or answerer, use a comment to request it. We should focus on improving questions and answers as much as possible so that they can be directed and useful.
Do not use comments to answer questions! This is detrimental to the site and is a very bad habit to get into. If you see comment answers, flag them. They often make users decide "it's already been answered, so there's no reason to add an actual answer".
