Thanks to everyone that responded.
It seems to me that the establishment of a common communication channel
by the RSC (Raku Steering Council) would in itself define the Raku
Community. Those who want to be a part of the community would track
(follow, read, contribute etc) the channel. I don't think it is
something that needs to be over-thought. Every channel has its
advantages and disadvantages, and there's going to be someone who does
not like the result.
But the current situation of multiple channels of communicating is
obviously going to create confusion. It would be like having multiple
places for defining the same set of constants for a software project, or
some other analogy of duplicating code that should be kept in one place
and referred to, not written and maintained in multiple places.
Also, if like-minded people have a way to share and cooperate, a
community will build. Facilitating the growth of a community will have
an impact on the acceptance of Raku as a language.
Having multiple differing approaches to the same problem can be good -
not arguing with that. But if there's no common way to share information
about the multiple approaches, how can the different approaches be
compared? If they can't be compared, then the advantages of multiple
approaches are lost. And no one can be certain that their efforts are
being considered.
It turns out - from comments of JJ and Vadim - that Altai-man's
initiative is a personal one. Had it not been late at night (for me) and
had there been an established channel where plans for community
resources are shared, I would have realised that straight-away. Instead,
I got annoyed and lost sleep (silly and unreasonable, but I am human).
Daniel, I look forward to hearing from you. Altai-man, please send me a
link that I can catch up with what you are planning (I'm not so good at
tracking multiple github repos).
One of the things I would like to do is to set up a way of doing
documentation that will allow for multiple languages to be possible,
which means that it should be possible to show the same documentation
file side-by-side in two languages, with text for each language kept in
a separate file, but for equivalent places in the documentation to be
synchronised. It would also be good to have revisionning history
visible, so that updates in the main text can be tracked so as to update
in a target language text.
Regards,
Richard
On 14/03/2021 21:16, Daniel Sockwell wrote:
I agree with the points Vadim and JJ made: There's a good chance that having a
more official
communication channel would _not_ have prevented surprise here, since the
amount of progress
on the a potential docs redesign seems to have taken many people (including
me!) by surprise.
I guess that's what happens when our community has "forgiveness >> permission"
as a core value!
That said, I also agree with Vadim that we should have a better way to
communicate things like
this,
even if it wouldn't have been relevant in this particular case. In fact, we
theoretically do: our
website lists the perl6-announce list, which is supposed to be "low traffic (a
few emails a
month)".
https://raku.org/community
Looking at the archive for that list, it has been **very** low traffic indeed:
the last message was
sent in 2015. So we clearly haven't been using it, and starting now (when we're
about to finally
move on to raku-* mailing lists) probably doesn't make much sense. But, once we
do, making an
effort
to actually use the raku-announce list seems like a good way to address this
issue.
Finally, Richard, in the interest of not taking you by surprise again on the
same topic, I wanted to
mention that, inspired by the proposed doc site redesign and your comments
about the broader topic,
I'm now working on a proof of concept along the same lines (because I have a
slightly different vision
of what a redesigned website might look like, but don't think I can communicate
it without a POC). I
hope to be able to share more details in the coming days.
Best,
Daniel / codesections
