In the big wave of emails exchanged today, I sent this one, by accident to the wrong mailing list. I recopy it below:
When I went to pycon, the most important thing I learned is the importance of a diverse community for the development of python. This I learned from the top, the board of the Python Software Foundation (cf. Lindberg's keynote at pycon, for instance), and saw in action absolutely everywhere. This diversity is to be understood in a very broad sense: - diversity of origins, - diversity of genders, - diversity of lifestyles, - diversity of professional activities, - ... I can egocentrically agree with the PSF on the fourth: the fact that python is tied to so many different fields, ranging from professional software development world to all kinds of scientific disciplines, is a major selling point for many people. This was the case for me (and William), coming from a world of special purpose mathematical software. Relying on a mature language with a diverse ecosystem encourages a wider array of contribution to sage. I will posit that a similar motivator was present for many of us who come with previous experience in other languages. If your software community is not inclusive, you will reject individual contributions that might be very interesting (and remain unaware of it), and that pattern will lead to larger collaborations having a hard time working at the periphery of the core project. This will decrease the chance of the core project recruiting new contributors. And we are talking about highly qualified contributions here, contributions that the sage project really does not want to end in Magma first. For instance, pick the LMFDB or findstat. How much of their code is written tiptoeing around sage itself, and if you make an objective assessment should fit better in sage than in their project? Bear in mind that the software was developed itself already tiptoeing around sage's core community (which might be unfair, because a community's tone is often defined by just a few individuals who speak louder). You might ask how origin, genders, lifestyles come in play here. Well, being inclusive starts simply by being curteous and making people feel at ease, and in some particular circumstances being "explicit is better than implicit". It might very well be that a queer person finds the python community very welcoming (based on objective facts such that one out of five tracks at pycon was aimed at promoting diversity in the community, or the diversity of the speakers), that she wants to contribute back, so much so that she decides to organize a python education summit, where educators of students of all backgrounds and ages can share tips on how to build a python pipeline together, one that takes anyone between the age of 5 to the age of whatever and turns them into a competent enough programmer that the community is better off from it. Somehow it all works for the better, because you have to trust individuals that if they like a project they will contribute to it in a positive way, with their own creativity. This pipeline exists, and is actively fostered by the Python Software Foundation as one of the most important assets of the python ecosystem. Contrast the shortsightedness of the academic community wrt the leaky pipeline for instance, with the attitude of the PSF described here. There is no comparison. At the same time, my reflections since pycon have led me to understand that it would make sense for things to develop the way they have so far. The PSF has much closer contacts to the corporate world, and it has a much smaller board (which helps make bold decisions more easily than a decentralised system of tenured professors). How are the corporate world connections important? Well, open source software is the flagship of Open Innovation, a new and deep trend in industry that encourages opening up to the world what was considered trade secrets not long ago (cf. the work of Georg von Krogh, for instance). Open Innovation makes more business sense if the community that watches those overtures is wider, because it is then more likely to come up with new ideas that would have never arisen within closed walls of the company. Following perfect logical arguments, after some stage the only way to grow a community is to make it more diverse (in the broad sense described above), and companies realised that too: promoting diversity also makes business sense. Now this idea is flowing back to open source software, like the python ecosystem, and it is only to the credit of the PSF to take this stance. This is very different from other languages apparently. Maybe my perspective of the python community was skewed by the fact that pycon is a US-centric conference. I would be curious to see how it compares to EuroPython for those aspects, but will be unable to attend. All this is especially true I would think for software like sage, which aims to be a replacement to the large CAS software companies. Look at all the outreach efforts that have "Wolfram" in their name. I am not saying that the sage core community should develop a copy of the whole Wolfram ecosystem. What I am advocating is to understand that beyond sage there is a wider ecosystem of people who are devoted to goals around sage (LMFDB, sage-combinat, findstat, sagemathcloud, the failed sage-explorer,...), possibly different from yours but that active mutual cooperation would be beneficial. While 90% of the code of these projects will not belong to sage, it is important that their extension points do sit in the code and are thought through, because these extension points welcome creativity and other innovators to build cool stuff on top of sage, and make it easier for the core contributors to help them too, with epsilon additional effort. Finally, for the specific context of how successful mathematical communities work together, I would advise anyone to read papers by Ursula Martin and her coauthors. Paul-Olivier Dehaye SNF Professor of Mathematics University of Zurich skype: lokami_lokami (preferred) phone: +41 76 407 57 96 chat: pauloliv...@gmail.com twitter: podehaye freenode irc: pdehaye -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "sage-devel" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to sage-devel+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to sage-devel@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
