[Chicken-users] inventory of community skills

[Brandon J. Van Every]

Hi all,

I've previously attempted to organize various communities.  Several of 
them have been technical.  One I even partly succeeded at: the Seattle 
Functional Programmers.  http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/SeaFunc/  It 
lives on without me; I really haven't been involved for almost a year 
now.  I may come back to it, but not without new purpose and energy.

One of the difficulties of organizing a community, is getting people to 
do things.  What causes people to actually want to do things?  Where's 
the Tom Sawyer "paint the fence" element of it all?  For those not 
familiar with the story, Tom tricks all the neighborhood kids into 
thinking that painting the fence is a game.  He says it's ringing a bell 
on a steamer, and all the neighborhood kids buy it.  "Clang!  Clang!"  
He sits back and munches an apple while everyone does the work for him.  
The fence is elaborately painted with many coats, at a far higher 
quality than he personally would have accomplished.

I'm not trying to set you up for gratuitous exploitation.  I think 
people realize I do my fair share.  What I am trying to do, is figure 
out how to grow the Chicken community by roughly an order of magnitude.  
I'd like to get us out of the tens of contributors and into the 
hundreds.  We have a core of good people who work on things that are 
very much needed.  But we don't really have all that many people.  I am 
inclined to believe that if we had a lot more people, a lot more would 
get done.  I know "The Mythical Man Month" is topical to such a 
discussion.  But as I see it, solo people are currently working on big 
tedious jobs, and they lose motivation.  Certainly that's what I'm going 
through right now.

So I'm interested in getting more labor, and distributing labor, so that 
Chicken grows and is not a harsh burden on any one particular person.  I 
want Chicken to be a facilitator, not a time sink.  A profitable 
business model is one that gives you a lot more back than you put in.  
I'd like everyone in the Chicken community to find it profitable.  
*Everyone*.  I'm not interested in zero sum games, I want win-win.

You could say I want to take Open Source to the next level.  A lot of 
open source gets done as the product of a handful of key people, with 
most of the rest along for the ride.  I don't think that's a sustainable 
development model.  Key people get burned out.  To keep software from 
becoming a never-ending maintenance PITA, we need key *teams*, and a way 
to partition work amongst people in the teams.

We also need a way to enjoy this.  Most people aren't looking for a dull 
job in their free time.  And I daresay, no one can sustain such jobs 
indefinitely.

As a first step, I propose a comprehensive inventory of people's skills 
in the Chicken community.  This needs to be more than just a bunch of 
author's bio pages.  It needs to be a searchable database.  Also, people 
need this information automatically waved under their noses.  It could 
be an e-mail every 2 weeks, or tool tips on the wiki, or some other 
mechanism.  People need to know what other people are capable of doing, 
and what they're offering to do.  They need stimulus to connect with 
each other.  I know I find it deadly boring to peruse people's bios for 
their own sake.  I might do it for 5 or 10 people.  I'm certainly not 
going to do it for 250 people.

But if I happened to learn, in the ordinary course of events, that 5 
people were interested in OpenGL stuff and had stated a willingness to 
work on such capabilities, maybe I'd see a way to form a team and get 
something done.  Maybe if such projects were short and of deliberately 
narrow scope, we'd actually bang one out and call it good.  Maybe we 
could do things with wikis, eggs, or other support resources that would 
make it easier to form such micro-projects.

I don't know much about databases.  I don't really care about the 
technological underpinnings.  I just know there's a social engineering 
problem that has to be solved.  Chicken can't escape being but one 
implementation of a marginal language, if it lacks superior grassroots 
organization.

Caveat: if anyone could invent a miracle labor saving technology 
instead, then maybe we wouldn't have to be socially savvy.  But I'm not 
seeing it.  My impression of Chicken, to date, is it requires a lot of 
manual labor to get anything done.  There are no miracles, it's just 
programming.  So I think we need more labor, to get more things done.

Anyone have any comments about what organizational strategies might help 
here?


Cheers,
Brandon Van Every