Q:

Any news on the graduation from beta?

Given the performance of the beta site. How do we know if and when a graduation is in order?

A:

I've been monitoring this beta's site activity on Area51 Stack Exchange dashboard and Stack Exchange sites overview very closely. From what I can tell, the main statistics I've been looking at is the questions per day indicator and if you only look at this rate (currently around 14 questions asked per day), Ethereum Stack Exchange is the most active beta site in the network (followed by Adruino (13), Mechanics (11) and Gardening (10)).
However, site activity might be the main indicator for graduation, but there are also some other soft factors that also play an important role.

User base: This site wont graduate until it has a solid (and maintains an active) user base. The stats on Area51 might be misleading as they are probably placing the mininmung requirements too low (compare mechanics user base to our's on Area51 for instance, they are also waiting for graduation). I think we wont recieve a graduation notice unless we have at least 5 users above 10k reputation (a.k.a. access to moderator tools privilege) and a dozen users above 3k reputation (a.k.a. cast open and close votes privilege).
Meta activity: This site is very active on the main topic, but the activity on meta is currently very low. We need to get more involved with defining what this site actually is, e.g., what is on topic, what is off topic, what is our topic, what should our documentation contain, etc. pp.? See also our current challenge. To get an interesting insight into beta progress updates by the community, you can follow this August 2015 and that January 2016 report on the Adruino beta site.

So, if you want to speed up graduation process, you can do multiple things for now.

Ask 1 good question a day, this wont keep graduation away.
Vote good content up, vote low quality content down. This will separate the wheat from the chaff, and also will generate reputation for users and maintain a solid userbase.
Get involved in meta. You are invited to discuss, debate and propose changes to the way the Ethereum Stack Exchange community itself behaves (discussions), as well as how the software itself works (bugs, features, support).

Thanks for coming to meta and helping out to mature this site.

