Worldbuilding will be one year old on September 16, 2015. We've got a great community here and lots of great content, so if any bunch of people could come up with fun ideas for how to celebrate our first birthday, it'd be this community. :-)
Thoughts?
How about a "share a glimpse into your world" week?
If you've asked questions here it's probably because you have a project -- maybe a full-on novel/game/script/etc you're in the midst of, or maybe a more early-stage idea. Either way, would people be willing to share a (non-contract-voiding, non-copyright-constrained) bit of what you're doing? A drabble (very short writing), a scene, a short story, a setting description, a sketch or painting... something that shows a little bit of what you're doing with your worlds?
If people like this we'll figure out how to do it in a way that's consistent with site structure. I'm envisioning a meta post with links to material elsewhere, so you can host (and control) it yourself. If you don't post it directly on SE then it's not subject to the CC-BY-SA license, which has been relevant over on Writers with some "share your work" projects. But I'm open to other ideas for structuring it, too.
There's been a lot of discussion in comments (thanks!) about implementation. If we could get a BlogOverflow blog that'd be great, but SE might not allow it (see the linked post). If not, and given that the content might vary widely -- short text pieces, hundred-page reference documents, drawings, videos, things I haven't thought of -- I think people should post their material wherever it makes sense and we'll make a nice meta post with links to all of it. That way it can be on your blog, in a Google doc, a GitHub repository, a Vimeo link... whatever works best for you. The downside is that it's harder for users here to provide feedback (since it won't be posted here), so I'd encourage you to do it somewhere that allows people to comment, but that's up to you.
Followup: Post links to your work on this meta post. This is a staging area, not the final collection; someone will later take all this and make a blog post and/or meta post to tie it all together.
Relaunch the blog
This answer is a compendium of other answers. Let a thousand flowers bloom.
To celebrate our first year, we will re-launch the blog and make several posts during the month of September to kick it off. We'd like to see posts from lots of people. The new blog site should make that a lot easier. Please think about how you'd like to participate.
Topics/themes that have been suggested include:
Memorable questions and answers (or groups of them) -- what really stood out for you this year? Different people will have different favorites, and there's room for everybody. Write up something about what you enjoyed and why, and maybe award some light-hearted badges.
Glimpses into your worlds -- post something that uses your world, like a story or a game module or a single scene or a setting description. Related: case studies.
Share a world (or some portion thereof) -- great project for collaboration here. This is related to the previous item, but the focus here is on the world rather than how it's being used. Think of this as something you would give to an author or game developer to work with.
The world-building process, tips for deploying your world, and master classes (start a series in September) -- not the what but the how.
Any of these suggestions for specific articles -- or insert your idea here.
Topics that are too open-ended, broad, or opinion-based to work on a Q&A site. The blog is a great place to explore some of those ideas.
I'd like to see posts in September from lots of users, both one-offs (no ongoing commitment) and first posts in series. Want to write a series of articles over the next year on map-making? Designing ecosystems? Zombies? Time-travel? Alien biology? Now's a great time to start.
If you're interested, have ideas, contributions or feedback, or want to be added to the blog, drop into the blog chatroom and let us know.
What if we made our own world (or part of a world) together?
We could do a top-down design of whatever it is by having people propose and vote on different ideas, starting at the '5000 ft. view'. Then, we would dig deeper and more specific with more polls or questions. People could even propose and vote on what we will design.
We could even have different people in charge of different sections of the design, so it doesn't burden one person too much. (Maybe if your idea gets voted for, you get put in charge of makings polls and managing everything for the next level of the design?)
It seems that Stack Overflow did something similar to this: highlighting some of the more memorable (though not necessarily most viewed or most upvoted) posts we've seen throughout the past year.
Users who want to participate could post short blurbs as answers to a meta post that describe a post that they felt was clever/funny/brilliant/extremely helpful/awesome, especially if that post didn't get many views or votes (though the point is not to garner the post more of those, just more accolades).
I don't think folks would get swag for participating, but I shouldn't speak for Stack Exchange. . .
Analytics
Let's look at the past year in numbers, using graphics. General activity of the site over the year and how it's comparing with other sites.
We could also have different analysis like:
what is the best time to post a question in term of views and participation.
Can we correlate up-votes with certain days of the week?
What make popular question well, popular (I'm mostly thinking about the subjects of questions or the vocabulary used).
I realize that it's not always about Worldbuilding per see but that would be interesting nevertheless.
I'm thinking we could post something on the blog or maybe a post on meta: Best questions for a specific topic.
More specifically, best questions: Dictator edition
It's not meant to be taken too seriously but do you think that the formulation could be offensive for some people?
Perhaps we could hand out a Birthday Contributor Badge. (Can we even make custom badges? Maybe a prerogative of diamond moderators.)
I'm thinking something like:
Gold badge --> Contributed for 9 or more months during the inaugural year.
Silver Badge --> Contributed for 6 or more months during the inaugural year.
Bronze Badge --> Contributed for 3 or more months during the inaugural year.
I like the idea of sharing parts of our stories, but I'd like to suggest something a little bit different: short stories on demand.
It can go like this:
The person with the highest reputation on the site (or a moderator, or the first signed person... just pick someone to start) gives the topic as a question on meta, and people write their stories about that subject as answers.
After some time, for example 24 hours, the person with highest score is declared as winner and gets to suggest next topic (we can close the question for a few hours before declaring a winner to give a chance to those who contributed last minute).
The point is to write quickly, choose the winner, move on to next topic.
We can have as many iterations as we want to.
EDIT:
Topics can be introduced in several ways:
And here is a crazy idea (probably not doable thanks to copyright laws, but cool nonetheless): we could compile the winning stories in a popular e-book format and donate it to some foundation to help it rise money for their noble cause. My type would be Electronic Frontier Foundation, because they would know how to handle it best and they do a lot for us regarding out rights online, so we kinda owe them.
