Re: Ada group on identica

["Marc A. Criley" <mcNOSPAM@mckae.com>]

On 12/09/2010 02:58 AM, Maciej Sobczak wrote:

> Considering a small size of the Ada community, creating too many
> groups, forums, fan pages and whatnot like this will inevitably lead
> to dispersing the effort. I'm not sure if the community can afford
> this.

(I know your concern has diminished, but I wanted to make a point anyway :-)

I think effort (and people) are dispersed only when one totally abandons 
one "community" to join another. comp.lang.ada is probably the 
longest-serving, and probably strongest, Ada community on the internet. 
Sure, there's been turnover and participation waxes and wanes, but it 
does seem to be the home port, so to speak.

Taking Ada knowledge and advocacy to other venues in no way requires the 
dilution of the comp.lang.ada community.  Overall it can increase the 
size of the community, some participants of which may end up here either 
casually or actively.

And instead of there being just a single home port for Ada, there can be 
a network of Ada havens that leverage one another.

For instance, I'm the creator and moderator of the Ada sub-reddit 
(http://www.reddit.com/r/ada). I regularly read comp.lang.ada for links 
to interesting articles and ANNOUNCEments of newly available products 
and releases, and I also monitor Thomas Locke's Ada Denmark site 
(http://ada-dk.org) for material. (Plus I subscribe to various mailing 
lists and just stumble across things from time to time.) And Reddit can 
be a source of material that I uncover, and those who monitor it can 
then pass that material on to others.

Each of us has our own set of readers and subscribers, and passing along 
information from one to another leverages network effects to get it to 
those who may not have the time to fish for information across the Web, 
or who are only dabbling in Ada to get a feel for it.

Our good buddy R. Tyler Croy recently wrote a blog post 
(http://unethicalblogger.com/posts/2010/12/ada_surely_you_jest_mr_pythonman) 
about his experiences learning Ada and posted it in the general 
programming forum on Reddit, where it did very well, garnering a lot of 
comments, discussion, and interest. I leveraged off his submission with 
a brief plug for the Ada sub-reddit, and in one day the number of 
subscriptions increased 10%, that was the largest one-day, or even one 
*week*, increase ever. It's hardly likely that there was just simply a 
bunch of Ada programmers on Reddit, who didn't know about the Ada 
sub-reddit, but who had now suddenly become aware that there was 
someplace associated with one of their hangouts to which they could 
join. No, I expect most of those new subscriptions were individuals who 
were intrigued by the discussion, and have opted to now keep on eye on 
what's up with Ada.  Some of these may, like Tyler, become an active 
participant in the community.

The Ada group on identica, then, is just another means of potentially 
expanding that community, providing another avenue for advocacy to those 
who might not have had any contact up till now with any of the 
established Ada points of presence on the internet.

Marc A. Criley