On Sun, 18 Nov 2018 at 09:29, Richard Kenneth Eng <horrido.hobb...@gmail.com> > wrote: > >> Some of you may already be aware of my presentation at *Smalltalks 2018*, >> the outcome of which was full funding for my Smalltalk programming >> competition. See My Keynote at the Salta Conference >> <https://hackernoon.com/my-keynote-at-the-salta-conference-435dfaccc888>. >> > This is really great. I applaud your drive to pursue your competition idea.
> >> Three years ago, David Buck provided an outline for the competition. See >> attached. >> >> I would like to use that as a starting point, though I am open to >> alternative suggestions. >> >> The reason for this post is the following... >> >> I need volunteers to code the competition. >> > Your request is really open ended and while maybe not you intent, sounds like you want someone to deliver the whole thing for you. That could be a 10 to 20 day commitment at a $1000/day - who knows from the scope you've presented. Its like your asking for a blank cheque. And it "feels" like the full onus would be on the developer and that responsibility can be off-putting. Even people that may be inclined to help may not have the spare cycles for that commitment. They can be already be doing a *lot* of volunteer time to help Pharo which suits their priorities. Even people who believe your project is a priority may be caught up in commitments they can't drop. So there are a lot of precondition hurdles you need to hurdle to get helpers. So what you are doing is kicking off an "new" open source project. And further, in essence what you are doing is building a mini-community of helpers (even if that is one helper, and notice the distinction from pure volunteer). Now as ESR says... "When you start community-building, what you need to be able to present is a plausible promise. Your program doesn't have to work particularly well. It can be crude, buggy, incomplete, and poorly documented. What it must not fail to do is (a) run, and (b) convince potential co-developers that it can be evolved into something really neat in the foreseeable future." http://www.catb.org/esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/cathedral-bazaar/ar01s10.html > I am nowhere near qualified to do so, as my knowledge of Pharo is limited. >> > This is a red herring. The majority of your "plausible promise" is the model, with unit tests demonstrating its operation. That should be able to be coded platform independently. When you progress to needing platform specific knowledge (e.g. gui, networking, web framerworks) you can start by asking specific questions in relation to your "plausible promise". You can encourage people can install your "plausible promise" on their machines to provide concrete examples to help the discussion, The trick is, once someone has installed your "plausible promise" and see it working in their infancy it becomes much more real for them, sparks ideas for small improvements and they are *much* more likely be inspired to help you. So personally, in general I'm open to helping (and I'm quite susceptible to being deeply drawn in) I'm just not inspired enough right now to drop any of my other commitments to take the lead with this. >> Without help from Pharoers (or, at least, Smalltalkers), the competition >> is in jeopardy. This is a great opportunity to promote Pharo. (The original >> competition three years ago was going to use VisualWorks, but since Cincom >> did not see fit to support my competition this year, I decided to go with >> Pharo.) >> >> Please contact me if anyone is interested. It would be a terrible shame >> to waste this opportunity. >> > On Wed, 21 Nov 2018 at 06:37, Richard Kenneth Eng <horrido.hobb...@gmail.com> wrote: > Not even a single nibble? Doesn't anyone care about promoting Pharo? > There are plenty of people here that are glad to donate significant time to helping Pharo. Frankly to imply otherwise is off putting and doesn't help you case. > What a colossal lost opportunity! > Getting no takers within a few days doesn't mean the end of the line. It means that there is something wrong with your strategy. I've given you a few tips. I hope you can adapt and persevere. It would be great to see this succeed. Please flood us with any technical questions you need to overcome. Very happy to help in this regard and it builds your presence and people's familiarity with you and the project and *then* you are much more likely people are drawn in to become involved. HTH, cheers -ben >
