On 21/06/2018 07:23, horrido wrote: > I'm disappointed in the response. Only two contributors of $100 each. This is > extremely tepid. > > There must be thousands of Smalltalkers around the world. How to reach out > to them? It can't be that hard to fund this contest. I mean, there are many > stupid causes on GoFundMe that have raised tens of thousands of dollars! > This Smalltalk programming competition is anything but stupid. > > If only 1500 Smalltalkers each contributed a paltry $20, the contest would > be fully funded. It would only take 300 contributors of $100 each. I think that money is the wrong incentive to get people involved.
You can't pay students to get them converted. Massive propagation of ideas these days are horizontal rather than vertical. It is, breadth first, word of mouth, instead of authoritative articles, this kind of competition, etc. Your articles did a good job of rising awareness, but there is a lot missing. If you want to get MORE (quantity) people involved, you need to make Pharo more "pop cultured" as many mainstream tools are seen, and that itself means becoming more mainstream or follow certain practices, which also means having success stories people would like to imitate, etc. Even if we get people like Kent Beck, Martin Fowler, any other "influencer" aware of the benefits of Smalltalk to recommend it, the downloads would spike, but I bet one leg the users will bounce as fast as they download it. IMO if we don't understand that as a community, Pharo will still have it's niche user base. Not that I dislike it, but I would be more comfortable as a niche but with a bigger user base. Regards, -- Esteban A. Maringolo
