Graduation entails many things, which it made sense to group back when sites were supposed to graduate or fail after three months:
- Remove the sword of Damocles of shutdown.
- Give the site its own name — but we aren't doing that after all.
- Give the site a distinctive visual look.
- Remote “beta” from the site description, which in itself gives a feeling of accomplishment and permanence.
- Moderator elections.
- Migration paths.
- Increased privileges.
- Mention in the footer of other graduated sites.
- Swag!
When betas can last years, it doesn't make sense to group all of them in one package.
Moderator elections should happen when the community is large enough to sustain them.
Migration paths should be enabled when policies have settled. Typically, a few months is enough, but this needs to be studied on a case-by-case basis.
“Beta” carries the implication of something unfinished, with a risk of failure. So the beta qualifier should be removed when the site has reasonably well-defined and stable policies, and has shown a steady growth or has shown to capture a significant part of its target audience. This may not involved getting 10 questions per week! Many Stack Exchange sites (Skeptics, Theoretical Computer Science, Cooking, …) are perfectly healthy with far less than 10 q/week.
Tying mention in the footer to graduation is odd. Why hide a site when it's trying to grow? Beta sites should be mentioned in the footer as soon as they appear in the hot questions list. Which, currently, is from the start of the public beta.
Raising privileges can happen when there are enough users across the larger privilege brackets. However, raising privileges is a penalty for users in the 125—20000 reputation range, i.e. for all but the top users who use the site more than occasionally. So it should only be done if there's some reward to compensate. Raising privileges should be done either when the “beta” qualifier is removed or when the site gets a new design, I'm not sure which.
Site-specific swag has to follow design. Is swag even done these days?
Therefore things should happen roughly in this order:
- Mention the site in the footer as soon as it's public. (Or later, but if a site is ready for hot questions, it's ready for the footer.)
- When a site pair has a stable policy that questions about $topic are off-topic on A, on-topic on B, and the community on A has a good idea when questions on this topic are ok for B, enable the migration path following a meta discussion on both sites. “No migrations for beta sites” made sense when beta site meant fluctuating policies, but that reasoning is long obsolete.
- When a site has enough of a community to sustain elections (I don't know how to quantify that, this should be a separate election), run elections.
- When a site has become stable enough and has sufficient audience, declare it graduated: remove the beta label.
- When you get around to it, give the site its own design.