It took over a year for The Workplace StackExchange site to get to public beta, and now that it is, I would like to ensure that people know it exists and is ready for your questions (and answers). This is especially true for people who have committed to the Digital Preservation SE proposal and are looking to gain experience in the StackExchange network.

As a new public beta (only 19 days old at the time of writing), it has a very brief FAQ and the specifics of the site scope are not written in stone; it’s a site and a community still defining itself. In general, however, The Workplace is for “members of the workforce navigating the professional setting.”

Sounds broad, I know. And it is! It’s also important to note that while a lot of the current users spend a lot of time at Programmers SE, Project Management SE, and UX SE—this is not an IT or software-development specific site. It’s not even specific to office jobs, although it’s true a lot of the questions skew that way because most community members have office jobs.

Some of the more popular tags for questions are résumé, hiring-process, career-development, and work-environment, to name but a few (of over a hundred).

Not only is it a nice place to be—plenty of space for questions and answers, helpful quasi-moderators (we don’t have official ones yet), low-key and useful—let me reiterate how useful it will be to all of the folks who want the Digital Preservation proposal to make it through the commitment stage: proposals need to have a number of users with at least 200 reputation on other SE sites, to show that there’s a core group of users who know how StackExchange works.

Come to The Workplace and get your feet wet! We’re friendly.