How can we grow our meta activity?

Question

Here at StackExchange, we try to nurture our new communities to the point that they are mostly self-sustaining. Users gain new privileges allowing them to further shape the site through their participation, as their rep increases. When the site as a whole matures and grows to a certain point, we encourage the community to choose its own moderators.

Unfortunately, Drupal Answers doesn't quite have the community investment in meta that we need before we can hold moderator elections. Meta involvement is crucial to the future of the site -- especially when time for mod elections rolls around. We need good, well-rounded nominations, candidates who have been involved in meta enough to be invested in the decisions made here, and enough active users on meta to ensure that the site's community is well represented when voting takes place.

So, I put it to those of you already here reading meta... how do we get the Drupal Answers community to be more active on meta?

Some things that have worked for other sites:

• Trying to generate more meta activity, in the hope that more users will be drawn in.

• Scheduling a chat event or two and making meta participation one of the topics covered there.

• Having a moderator or Community Team member more actively feature select meta posts in the hope of raising meta awareness on the main site.

Of course, these are just a few ideas off the top of my head. What I really want is your ideas, and your input on what's been suggested. You know your community best, and you should be the people most invested in helping it grow and thrive.

Answer 1

Generating more meta activity is not going to increase the involvement in the meta site, as I have seen in the past months. It could help if users would get a notification on their Super Drop-down menu every time a new question or answer is posted on the meta site, in the same way it happens to moderators.
The second suggestion can help, especially if it is made clear that participation on the meta site is necessary for Drupal Answers to survive; until the users don't have that clear, selecting meta posts for making users aware of the meta site would not help.

It seems to me that many users on Drupal Answers don't have an account on other SE sites, and just come on Drupal Answers to get answers to their questions, but they are not enough interested in participating on the meta site.
It would be interesting to know how much users with an account on Drupal Answers have also an account on Meta Stack Overflow, and in which way they participate on Meta Stack Overflow. If they participate enough on Meta Stack Overflow, but they don't participate on this meta, then that would be an indication that something needs to be corrected.

It would also be interesting in testing how users would participate in the moderator elections; for example, it could be posted a question here on meta to select a new provisional moderator, where who wants to be a provisional moderator posts an answer on that question, and the most voted user becomes moderator for a limited period of time (e.g. one month). This would help on understanding how users would participate in the moderator elections, and eventually understand what needs to be done to increase the participation on the meta site. I know it's not what it is done on other SE sites, but I remember that it is how provisional moderators were chosen on English Language & Usage.