A proposed schedule for weekly challenges

Question

The response to the weekly challenge question has been a resounding "yes," so the next step is to decide how we'll manage the schedule. There'll be two simple parts to this, each taking one week:

1. Collect ideas for a theme or concept to base the challenge on, and choose the highest voted after a week.
2. The challenge is collaboratively written, and it is then posted at the end of the week.

These will be streamlined, so while one challenge is being written, ideas are already being collected for the next. So, on week one, we think of ideas for challenge #1; on week two, we write challenge #1 and think of ideas for challenge #2; on week three, we write challenge #2 and think of ideas for challenge #3; etc.

Ideally, there should only be one meta post per week to reduce clutter. However, we could choose from any of these options:

1. Write challenges with meta questions, think of ideas with meta questions (2 per week)
2. Write challenges with meta questions, think of ideas in a chatroom
3. Write challenges in a chatroom, think of ideas with meta questions
4. Write challenges in a chatroom, think of ideas in a chatroom

We could also experiment with any of the following: Use the sandbox to write the questions, use a Github repo or Google Doc to write them, use some sort of polling site to decide on ideas, or... something else? (Post an answer with any ideas below!)

As for the dates, hopefully we can start this Friday or Saturday. (From the Mother Meta post about weekly challenges: "I like to give people a full week from Friday to Friday. That way people have the weekend to ponder the challenge and can start [...] when they get time on Monday.") If there's a clear consensus like there was on the other meta post here, we might be able to start on Friday; otherwise; we could start thinking of ideas for challenge #1 on Saturday and post on Friday for all challenges after that.

So, any thoughts? Assuming nobody objects in the answers and everyone seems to agree, the weekly challenges should start in a few days.

Answer 1

5. Write challenges in the sandbox + chat, use a single meta post to collect and vote on ideas.

Single meta post, as opposed to weekly meta post.

Each week, the top-voted theme gets picked and deleted, allowing close seconds to bubble up for the next week. There's no need to throw away good ideas from the previous week or repost them. New ideas can still be added at any time. If we ever feel, this post gets too cluttered, and new ideas can't find their way to the top any more, we can still ditch it and start a new one. But for starters, I wouldn't make a separate post each week.

As for writing the challenge, I think we've got the sandbox for that, and it's a good place to keep track of the spec in markdown. Discussion can happen in the comments there, or (more likely) in chat. Depending on how busy these discussions get, they could happen in The Nineteenth Byte or a dedicated chat room. I suggest we try keeping them in The Nineteenth Byte in the interest of increasing exposure of The Weekly Challenge Challenge, and if the discussion gets too spammy to use the chat room for much else, we can still move it out any time. (I'm just afraid if we move it to a separate chat room right away, we won't get much participation in writing the challenge.)

If it makes sense for a particular challenge, we can still use additional collaboration tools like GitHub (e.g. if a complex controller has to be written by multiple people). Until then, the tools we already have on SE, should suffice.