From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.4.4 (2020-01-24) on polar.synack.me X-Spam-Level: X-Spam-Status: No, score=-1.9 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_00 autolearn=ham autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 X-Google-Thread: 103376,75acdeaad9326407 X-Google-NewGroupId: yes X-Google-Attributes: gida07f3367d7,domainid0,public,usenet X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII-7-bit Path: g2news2.google.com!news2.google.com!npeer02.iad.highwinds-media.com!news.highwinds-media.com!feed-me.highwinds-media.com!post01.iad.highwinds-media.com!API-DIGITAL.COM-a2kHrUvQQWlmc!not-for-mail Date: Fri, 10 Dec 2010 16:01:44 -0600 From: "Marc A. Criley" User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.9.1.15) Gecko/20101027 Thunderbird/3.0.10 MIME-Version: 1.0 Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada Subject: Re: Ada group on identica References: <4ad07589-1d1a-4c3f-8937-c0895ea96281@w21g2000vby.googlegroups.com> In-Reply-To: <4ad07589-1d1a-4c3f-8937-c0895ea96281@w21g2000vby.googlegroups.com> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Message-ID: <5351f$4d02a27f$433a4ed8$32170@API-DIGITAL.COM> X-Complaints-To: abuse@usenetserver.com Organization: UseNetServer.com X-Trace: 5351f4d02a27fe69feb7d32170 Xref: g2news2.google.com comp.lang.ada:16865 Date: 2010-12-10T16:01:44-06:00 List-Id: 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