Erlang projects association

[Mickael Remond]

* Valentin <valentin@REDACTED> [2003-02-04 09:26:25 +0200]:

> > - We should not have limited this initiative to France.
> Does this mean that your association did not attract the critical mass in
> France?
> If so, why, in your opinion, it didn't?

Because, even if Erlang community is growing, let's face it, is it still
a small community. And it was even more small 2 years and a half ago
when Erlang-fr was started.

> > - We did not pay enough attention to the fact that promoting Erlang is
> > currently a very difficult task without a proper understanding of the
> > real expectations of both the users and the developers.
> 
> Maybe you should lead by an example, and tell us what are yours (personal)
> expectations from such an organization/association.

I am not speaking of expectations regarding the organisation. I am
speaking of expectations regarding the language itself, the satelite
project that are popping up elsewhere, etc.

You know the language competition is really fierce. The last ten years
have considerably pushed forward the development language. We have seen
Perl, Python, PHP, C#, Java, Ruby, Rebol, and many, many more.
The organisation should provide added value to members and more largely
to the rest of the Erlang community to attract more developer, have new
reference, see new successful project, etc...

> >That's why we have decided to create an association to pragmatically
> > work on those issues.
> 
> How does one work "pragmatically on those issues". Can you be a bit more
> specific?

This means that this should not be a "place" where we only think about
how Erlang should be and how even cooler it could become, but were we
will be doing things. I will take an example. Many people think that are
expecting Erlang tools could go further in web development. Yaws has
made this idea sensitive, but we still need some others things. One of
the step would be to think about what we are missing the most regarding
web development. What are the current work on those issues ? How could
we help ?
This might leads us to create a dedicated workgroup lead by people
willing to promote Erlang as a web development solution. This could be
based on a individual based initiative or if some companies wants to
invest some times into developing some open source based tools, we could
help by providing feedback, testing, maybe specs and code.

> 
> > The main goal of this association is to gather
> > users and developers, both individuals and companies to work on projects
> > that are needed to help us spread Erlang.
> 
> To what end? Maybe you should try to convince me (and maybe others) how is
> my life going to be better if I "join the association". What would I gain
> from spreading Erlang -- I understand only my reasons for doing it. I cannot
> say that I understand yours... you must articulate it better.

Please, I do not want too directive. I really do not want to defend my
view but what we need is make emerge a stronger community.

I think one of our first thing will be to provide an infrastructure for
this community so that every one can express its feeling.
They are plenty examples of Web based community that really help pushing
the tools further.

The infrastructure will be based on erlang-projects.org
We are now actively looking for a hosting solution.

> In my view, an association can be successful only if the individual members
> can align with the goals. We might as well help spread peanut butter on (or
> to) China. And what would be the benefit of doing it?

I disagree. For exemple go to http://www.zope.org/. 
This is a big, huge community web site around the Zope project. Do you
think all the members have the same goals ? Not at all. But they all
contribute to making the software a great, properly supported product,
with a lot of things happening around it.

Go on http://www.python.org/
They provide commercial links for active companies in the community.
They provide special Software interest group (SIG) for specific
important area for the development of the language.
All the member does not have the same goal, but they collaborate
together by the discussion and thus are making the "thing" happening.

I hope the infrastructure we are going to set up is going to have the
same effect on Erlang development.
And please do not read the following as buzzwords, but as something that
I feel: The association is not intended to have a central and unique way
to see the Erlang world, but as a facilitator to make things happens.

To get back to your point, yes, you might have a clear view of what YOU
should e spreading Erlang and think that other approach are useless. I
feel this is not true and that all our visions compose the big Erlang
picture.

> > The first tasks will be to identify the major domains for which Erlang
> > should shine. We will then start dedicated workgroups that will have to
> > identify existing relevant projects and to help them go further.
> 
> I suppose you have funding for that?

No. Not a cents but I hope we are going to be clever. I think we will
not need many funds. And we will start looking for way to gets funds if
we need more of them. But association member might be clever enough to
help making the things happen.

-- 
Mickaël Rémond