[Haskell-cafe] Building the community

Donald Bruce Stewart dons at cse.unsw.edu.au
Wed Dec 13 22:14:50 EST 2006


One of the great aspects of programming Haskell is the community.
We should aim to have the strongest, friendliest, most productive
community we can. We're doing a good job so far, can we do even better?

Reading this:

    "How to Build a User Community"
    http://headrush.typepad.com/creating_passionate_users/2006/12/how_to_build_a_.html

has inspired me to make some suggestions of what *you* can do to help
make Haskell the language and community people want to spend time on.

    * Always encourage newbies to ask questions

            + I rate us at 8/10

    *  Encourage newer users--especially those who've been active askers--to
        start trying to answer questions 

            + we can do more here. If you know the solutoin to a problem,
            dive in and help out. Canonical, type correct answers preferred!

            + if you're at the 'intermediate' stage, you can help *now* by
            contributing to the wiki, solving new user problems, blogging your
            ideas and code and so on.

    *  Give tips on how to answer questions

            + Ok. we can put up an article here. Some suggestions:
                - No questions are bad questions
                - Code should come with examples of how to run it
                - Solutions with unsafePerformIO should be discouraged (moreso ;)
                - Be polite! (we're good at this)

    * Adopt a near-zero-tolerance "Be Nice" policy when people answer questions
            
            + 8/10, we can do even better I think

    * Teach and encourage the more advanced users (including moderators) how to
    correct a wrong answer while maintaining the original answerer's dignity.

            + Pretty good. I encourage people to point out (privately) and
                encourage grumpy people to be nicer

So dive in! Help out new users, collaborate, contribute to the wiki, release
your code, and help make Haskell the language people want to use.

-- Don


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