Re: [Caml-list] how to encourage adoption of OCaml?

[Dean Thompson <deansherthompson@gmail.com>]

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> On Jul 9, 2016, at 9:03 AM, Armaël Guéneau <armael.gueneau@ens-lyon.fr> wrote:
> 
> If there has to be something other than IRC and the mailing list, I personnally
> quite like the idea of a forum. The *BB things sure have an old-school
> look&feel, but discourse [1] looks nice, for example, and I think the rust
> people use it for their user forum [2] (and it is free software).
> [1]: https://www.discourse.org/ <https://www.discourse.org/>
> [2]: https://users.rust-lang.org/ <https://users.rust-lang.org/>
A while back, I went looking for good BB/forum software that might help with large-group collaboration, and Discourse stood out for me. I like their theme of "Civilized Discussion”, which appears to me to go far deeper than just marketing — they really do seem to shape their user experience to facilitate/motivate constructive discussion. The Discourse user experience felt pleasant and comfortable to me. I like the fact that Discourse is broadly customizable through plugins. I like that it is a 20,000-commit open-source GitHub project. Bummer that it isn’t in OCaml :-).

But there’s at least one con: Discourse is not nearly as well established or widely known as some other alternatives, so might be less appealing to casual participants.

If we got some level of consensus among those interested in this topic that Discourse were worth a try, I would volunteer to host, set up, and administer a Discourse instance that was partly a new venue for OCaml beginners to seek help and partly a venue for coordinating work to foster OCaml adoption.

But as we think about whether that consensus exists, we should consider many risks. It would be terrible if this merely further fragmented a small community. We would need to carefully understand whether our community leaders were supportive of this move. More specifically, I think it would be wrong to conclude we had sufficient consensus unless that consensus included a respectable quorum of OCaml community leaders. We would also need to carefully think through integration with existing venues, such as whether we could/should host this on an ocaml.org subdomain.

Or perhaps we reach a consensus on some very different approach instead.

Dean


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