I love this site. I used to be heavily addicted to it and apparently reached the point of overexposure, so that my current activity level is much too low for my own liking, but I still think that this is the single best UX resource on the web, and I market it shamelessly to UX beginners.
And I think that this site can be the basis for a great international community of UX practitioners. But the whole SE platform is tailored for creating a great Q&A platform, while a community takes more than that.
One immediate example is Subjective questions. The criteria for closing them off are very efficient at supporting the SE goal and the quality of the site, but many of these questions offer excellent and relevant discussion topics (general career & industry advice, tool selection, book recommendations, "Why" questions etc.). As we know, SE, by design, is not very discussion-friendly. The Chatroom attempts to fulfill this need to a certain extent, but IMHO it doesn't do it very well.
Short story long, I created a UX.SE Facebook group.
The group description attempts to answer some of the questions that might arise, so I'll quote it here.
This is the Facebook group for members of the User Experience site of the StackExchange network. It is "unofficial" in the sense that it is not affiliated with the StackExchange network or endorsed by it in any way. Its purpose is to provide a place for discussion of UX-related matters which lie outside the scope of UX.SE or Meta UX.SE, and to do so in a format that cannot be provided by the Chatroom on the site.
The group does not intend to replace UX.SE for in-scope questions. Quite the opposite - hopefully it can bring in new quality traffic to the site, since a large UX group on Facebook is bound to attract practitioners who weren't originally on SE.
Posters of questions deemed to be a good fit for either UX.SE or Meta (or other SE sites), will be encouraged to move their post to the relevant site.
The group abides by the StackExchange Code of Conduct, meaning that its members are expected to Be Nice (http://bit.ly/UXSECoC).
Since UX.SE is open for all, so is this group. No "proof" of UX.SE membership is necessary or expected.
Everyone is welcome to join if they like the idea, or not if they don't.
I'll be interested to know what do the powers that be think of this idea. In the case that SE requests it, I will (be very sorry to) drop it.
