Thanks for the response, and fair enough in your goals. I suppose it will come down to how much participation unfolds and how responsive LM is to it, such as effectiveness at identifying need for new categories before participants tire of attempting to navigate the posts without them.
I am largely under the belief that the small number of posts experienced in the developer forums, that on one hand may be the foundation for LM's case to move to a unified and minimal forum system, has largely been due to developer's experiences of not being responded to in any consistent manner alongside the inefficiencies of that old system at tracking interests and engaging other developers with private messaging. If this impression is correct, then I suspect developers initial take on the community merger will only maintain and promote such a concern and keep them from investing into yet another new and from the developer perspective, empty system.
I would think LM would be asking themselves right now, what have we done to make developers want to participate in this forum?
As much as the identified goal sounds reasonable, it really sounds like the initiative, implementation, and roll out have ignored the needs of the main different players and their very different needs. It seems like a management decision disconnected from identifying with those different needs. For example, there was one week of notice that all forum activity would stop! Why could the two systems not run in parallel for a short while and yet LM announce that their sole participation would be in this system, and therefore requests developers to migrate as soon as possible? Give a chance for active threads to link to their continuing thread in the new system (no-brainer there)!
Does LM understand that participation in forums come when participants check in for updates to their threads of interest or new participants post because they expect a visibly active community will see their expression. This is what drives them to participate. At the beginning with a new product, a new community, there is the energy of this newness and the urge to be at the forefront of driving participation. That was what LM already achieved with the initial media, and a second phase with product launch and opening the SDK to the developer community at large. But that was then and this is now, and what is the event that is driving participation to this empty forum? Now there is nothing to check in on, there is no participation, there is no continuing the conversation, ... there is what? The developer community is annihilated until it regains the energy scrap by scrap to find a reason to participate. Maybe I will be proven wrong and the developer community will spring into life, but until such time, I think LM has really misunderstood its (potential) developer community at this time.
So, if this is not coming across as constructive, let me make an obvious constructive suggestion, re-open the developer forums and let us migrate at our pace, giving us the chance to merge our conversations into this system and the chance to feel our conversations matter to LM!