On Dec 19, 2005, at 1:29 PM, CJ Fleck wrote: > I have to say, that it is encouraging to see a community form in > about 1 week, but I am getting impatient. Right now all that seems > to be happening is a lot of people are sending out emails about where > this group should go. However, no one seems be stepping up to the > plate to get anything rolling. I guess, at this point I should point > out that said person is not going to be me. I'm an inexperienced > lisper, and really just want to help. That said, I have one key idea > that I think will help this group immensely. > > Someone set up a real web site for us.
Er, someone has, there's a web site at http://www.lispniks.com/cl- gardeners/. That it doesn't have every piece of content or functionality that we might like is a result of the fact that no one has done it yet. Feel free to send me any html that you think should go on the site. (And last night I set up a subversion repository--as soon as I figure out a good way to organize the material that builds the web site I'll be moving it there and then folks with the inclination can work on it like any other open source project. > One with project listings, > pages to coordinate projects, etc. Start out with the major topics > that have been talked about so far (i.e. GUIs), and ask people to > sign on for certain projects. I have found that people are much > better at getting work done and focusing on issues, if you give them > a bit of guidance. This is guidance. At the moment the place to do that is the ALU Wiki at: <http://wiki.alu.org/Gardeners_Projects> There are presently two categories of projects, "Proposed Projects" which are mostly just distillations of the conversations that have happened on the list and "Championed Projects" which are projects that have a person (the champion) who's stepped forward to guide the project. That person needn't be an experienced Lisper (though for some projects it will help). Once a project has a champion, the champion and any other volunteers should fill out the project page with a description of what problem the the project is aimed at solving and how they plan to attack it. When they're ready, they can ask that the project be blessed by the "Green Thumbs" to become an "official" CL Gardeners project. So, anyone who's eager to see progress should take one of the proposed project's page and put it into something roughly like the form of the two current championed projects. And volunteer to champion the project if they want. And Brad and I (the current Green Thumbs) are eagerly awaiting the first championed project that's ready to be blessed. At that point, as I've said in the past, > While the web site is going up, move this mailing list to a forum. > There is a reason that the Gentoo community is as strong as it is. > The support and communication is done in an efficient and > approachable manner. Mailing lists had their time, but 99% of us > don't care about *everything* that goes on. A forum is a nicer > interface. I take your point about not everyone needing to see everything. I'm happy to set up mailing lists for individual projects--the nice thing about mailing lists is that it's easy to see when there's new stuff. Note that you can also read the mailing list via Gmane on the web or through a newsreader. Personally, however, I prefer mailing lists to web forums. Which is not to say if someone wants to do the work of setting up a forum system that I'd be opposed to that. Certainly individual projects are free to set up whatever communication structures they see fit--though it'd be nice if there was at least a way for other gardeners to see what was going on in those fora. Let a thousand flowers bloom and all that. Anyway, the ultimate solution to actual work work not getting done is for folks to actually do work--everyone should feel to jump in. And anyone who is feeling personally blocked from doing something that they think would be useful by some technical or social problem should feel free to let us know what they'd be doing but for X and we'll see what we can do about X. -Peter -- Peter Seibel * [EMAIL PROTECTED] Gigamonkeys Consulting * http://www.gigamonkeys.com/ Practical Common Lisp * http://www.gigamonkeys.com/book/ _______________________________________________ Gardeners mailing list [email protected] http://www.lispniks.com/mailman/listinfo/gardeners
