Paul-Olivier,
Thank you for your very thoughtful comments in several different threads. Naturally there is no one response to all of them - indeed, it touches on things that researchers of open-source development and motivation (not the developers themselves) have been filling reams of (virtual) paper with. I hope you will find an open ear for your points. I will just comment on two of them. "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." Indeed! Although there are occasional flame-fests (the findstat thread being a notable recent example), it seems to me that the Sage community has time and again tried to avoid the "rtfm" ethic that sometimes guides open-source help forums. There are a number of people - some of whom are less active now - who have always made it a point to make the lists, asksage, etc. very welcoming to newcomers. Perhaps we need a refresher course on hospitality, if you have experienced otherwise. That said, I think you are referring to software contributions themselves, and here we come upon something William already stumbled on when he started psage (though I haven't checked in on that project in a while). A maturing project necessarily builds different self-governance structures (see Weber, "The Success of Open Source" and his analysis of several famous Linux episodes, for example) than when it was early in development, and at this time there is definitely a procedural barrier that tries to touch on some of the issues of quality that rjf and others occasionally bring up, but which makes it harder to get contributions in. (I'll be commenting longer on this in another thread.) However, I would argue this is a different kind of "inclusiveness" issue than what the PSF is referring to. In fact, I would argue that Sage is not suffering from a lack of inclusiveness at all in this sense, but rather from a lack of resources to manage or solicit contributions from a wide scope of areas, some of which are more peripheral to the software proper. This goes along with another of your points. "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." As some examples, I would point out: * The San Diego State tutorials - nicely done, now open for more development, but never either fully in Sage nor really fully taken advantage of. * The "Use Sage" idea from Springer, which didn't go anywhere (by consensus of developers) but also didn't really (as far as I know, I could be mistaken) pan out in the samizdat Sage world as planned. * Various other projects which aim to use Sage "under the hood" for other purposes, such as Mathlynx, possibly Ximera, the folks who do Maplets for Calculus in a new project But I really don't think it's because of some implicit or explicit lack of diversity, except in that, as with any open-source project, people scratch their own itch if they don't have some other incentive. The incentives don't have to be big - I recall trying out all kinds of tickets I didn't care about personally because they were on a list William gave us at a Sage Days - but there has to be *some* incentive. And for the contributors we currently attract, it tends to skew pretty heavily toward research, certainly with some for web development or teaching. So the issue is finding ways to promote some of the newer developments in the ecosystem without coercing, finding random revenue, or the like. SMC is a notable exception here, possible because William has some dedicated time set aside for this. Several categories I wish I had time to shepherd are: * Curated set of examples; interact.sagemath.org was a great start in this direction, but sort of petered out. * Having set of people who could go around country (world?) doing low-cost tutorials for research or teaching. * Making a high-quality set of screencasts for Sage use. I can't even count how many people have told me they wanted to do this, but I don't think there ended up being very many, and they certainly aren't organized in a nice central way. Compare this to Geogebratube. * Localization. This is harder because of the commands being in English, but there has been a lot of trouble even getting translations in because not enough people feel qualified at both the Sage and the language to review them properly. See e.g. [1]. I'm sure you can think of others. Unfortunately, after seven years or so of working with Sage, I'm not sure I have any good answer for how to make that happen. Geogebra has a good model, I think, and to some extent WeBWorK as well, but Sage is primarily aimed at a different place. Suggestions would be very welcome indeed. - kcrisman [1] http://trac.sagemath.org/query?status=needs_info&status=needs_review&status=needs_work&status=new&status=positive_review&component=documentation&summary=~translation&col=id&col=summary&col=component&col=status&col=type&col=priority&col=milestone&order=priority > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "sage-devel" group. 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