Clojure community organisation

[Daniel Solano Gómez]

Hello, all,

I've brought up the idea of some sort of Clojure community organisation
a few times on this mailing list. The ideas is to help grow the Clojure
community by doing things like supporting GSoC students, run
infrastructure like Clojars, help run conferences, etc. I have decided
to start moving forward and apply for fiscal sponsorship from the
Software Freedom Conservancy and Software in the Public Interest. Those
things take time to work themselves out. In the meantime, I appreciate
any input/feedback about what this org should do or what it should look
like. As such, I have posted a page on the community wiki to start
braainstorming and discussing ideas
<http://dev.clojure.org/display/community/Clojure+Community+Organisation>.

A big thank you to everyone. Participating in this community has been a
very positive experience for me, and I would love to see it to continue
to flourish. I appreciate any help or advice on how to make this
initiative succeed in supporting the community.

Sincerely,

Daniel

[Hildeberto Mendonça]

This is a awesome idea!

In my opinion, this organization would attract the maximum number of people if its mission is centred on Knowledge Management:

1. Wiki-based Clojure documentation, such as clojuredocs.org, containing the "official" documentation, but constantly improved by the community with more examples and rephrasing complex sentences, etc;
2. Wiki-based libraries documentation, related to Clojars and following the same model of the previous documentation;
3. Agregation of content produced by bloggers and websites out there, everything indexed by tags linked to Clojure versions and libraries in clojars for cross-navigation;
4. Agregation of videos and slides produced by conference speakers, instructors.
5. Everything gamefied so people can win points for their contributions and increase their reputation like in stackoverflow.com.

I would love to join as a member to have discounts in books, conferences, courses, tshirts, etc.

I absolutely rate professional certifications, but I'm in favour of certified courses, so we can be sure the instructors are capable of teaching Clojure properly, with idiomatic code.

What about promoting Clojure as a first language in universities? We would need to help teachers to create equivalent syllabus to the ones they are already using to teach Python, for example. 

So, this is my brainstorming.

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Community: http://www.cejug.net
Twitter: https://twitter.com/htmfilho

[Daniel Solano Gómez]

On Wed Apr 29 11:10 2015, Hildeberto Mendonça wrote:
> This is a awesome idea!
>
> In my opinion, this organization would attract the maximum number of people
> if its mission is centred on Knowledge Management:
>

> 1. Wiki-based Clojure documentation, such as clojuredocs.org, containing

> the "official" documentation, but constantly improved by the community with
> more examples and rephrasing complex sentences, etc;

> 2. Wiki-based libraries documentation, related to Clojars and following

> the same model of the previous documentation;

> 3. Agregation of content produced by bloggers and websites out there,

> everything indexed by tags linked to Clojure versions and libraries in
> clojars for cross-navigation;

> 4. Agregation of videos and slides produced by conference speakers,
> instructors.
> 5. Everything gamefied so people can win points for their contributions

> and increase their reputation like in stackoverflow.com.
>
> I would love to join as a member to have discounts in books, conferences,
> courses, tshirts, etc.
>
> I absolutely rate professional certifications, but I'm in favour of
> certified courses, so we can be sure the instructors are capable of
> teaching Clojure properly, with idiomatic code.
>
> What about promoting Clojure as a first language in universities? We would
> need to help teachers to create equivalent syllabus to the ones they are
> already using to teach Python, for example.
>
> So, this is my brainstorming.

Thank you for your input. You've brought up a few key things that are
important to help grow the Clojure community, especially better
documentation and learning materials. That's definitely something we
need to figure out how to promote.

I appreciate any ideas on how to an org can help ake this happen.

Sincerely,

Daniel

[Albin Stjerna]

I'd really like to see some sort of indexed infrastructure for documenting and standardising common patterns and anti-patterns on various levels – think Stack Exchange, but preemptive. I think this would go a long way toward helping newcomers and spreading good practices.

[Tom Marble]

@deepbluelambda:

Thank you for bringing this up! I am, like you, a huge fan of Clojure
and Free/Libre Open Source Software (and building community).

In the interest of full disclosure I on the Software Freedom
Conservancy [0] Evaluation Committee and I am a member of Software in
the Public Interest [1] (and a contributor to Debian -- one of the big
SPI projects). I would, therefore, need to recuse myself from voting
on any Clojure community organization.

The key rational you give on the wiki page [2] in asking for
support from a fiscal sponsorship organization is (in summary):

  A. GSoC (or a program like it) and student conference travel
  B. Infrastructure (like Clojars)
  C. User group/event support
  D. Provide beginner materials and training
  E. A place to donate to

Let me comment on each of these...


A. GSoC

First of all thank you for being being a GSoC mentor!
As long as Google continues GSoC (and the Clojure community
can provide motivated mentors and students) there is reduced
pressure for additional fiscal sponsorship. Often times mentoring
organizations will use their $500 portion [3] to help subsidize
student travel. I would guess that if we asked conference
organizers to support approved GSoC student travel they may
be able to help bridge any gaps.

I also want to make everyone aware of Outreachy -- a related internship
program intended to increase diversity in FLOSS [4]. Outreachy
is symbiotic with GSoC during the "summer" sessions: Outreachy
applicants that qualify for GSoC are encouraged to do so.
Unlike GSoC Outreachy applicants do *not* need to be students and
Outreachy offers a "winter" session. Outreachy is now a member
of SFC (and thus can take donations).


B. Infrastructure (like Clojars)

I think everyone will agree with me that we owe a lot of gratitude
to @atosborne @technomancy @tcrawley and @xeqixeqi for making
Clojars awesome (and an essential part of our Clojure workflow).

I notice that some of the costs are (or at least were) covered
by sponsors such as Heroku [5]. I am not clear on how additional
funding could or would be used for Clojars: I think we'd need hear
opinions on that from the Clojars maintainers directly.
(That being said I'd definitely donate!)

Both @htmfilho and @albinst brainstormed about additional
infrastructure ideas (which are cool and I bet there many more)!  One
tool I use all the time is Grimoire [6] and I wonder if @arrdem has
what he needs for this (or could do more with more support)?

I'm sort of torn about this... on the one hand I love the idea
of supporting cool tools, but on the other hand I'm worried
about how funds would be managed/distributed to toolmakers.
I think many of the cool tools we already have are works
of pure passion.


C. User group/event support

Typically fiscal sponsorship organizations help projects
run their own conferences. I can't even imagine trying to outdo
the amazing conferences put on by @puredanger @lynngrogan
and Cognitect. What's more I have to recognize conferences like
Clojure Conj, Clojure/West and Strangeloop for offering
opportunity grants [7] and diversity scholarships [8].

So if we don't run the conferences and the conferences already support
diversity and we might have at least a partial solution for students
(see above) then there may not be very much additional sponsorship
needed???

It's important to point out that our really cool ClojureBridge
events [9] benefit already from the fiscal sponsorship of
BridgeFoundry [10]. (advertisement: @ClojureBridgeMN [11] is
hosting three more workshops this year in the Twin Cities...
ask me how you can sponsor ClojureBridge to be even more awesome!)

As for user groups my guess is that local groups can attract local
sponsors for any other events. I'm not sure there's enough events in
this category (not covered by conferences and ClojureBridge) to
justify having a fiscal sponsorship organization.


D. Provide beginner materials and training

Providing fiscal sponsorship for beginner materials is tricky
in the same way funding B. Infrastructure is.

And I'll point out that there already are some community
resources for beginner materials (including ClojureBridge [12]).
Don't get me wrong.. I'm all in favor of more and better
beginner materials! (Well, maybe is fewer/concise materials
are "more", but that's another story...)

My guess is that training is tricky for a different reason:
training involves more money, more engineer time (vs. supporting
infrastructure) and already has competitive commercial offerings.
I'll try to find out how SFC handles this sort of thing.


E. A place to donate to

Any place that accepts donations (esp. in the non-profit sense)
must make explicitly clear how the donations will be used.
Therefore the to the question "what is the mission" (i.e.
the topics above) is a prerequisite for accepting donations.


In terms of organization you offer the options
  i) for-profit
  ii) 501(c)3 Non-profit
  iii) 501(c)6 Trade association
  iv) member in a fiscal sponsorship org like SFC or SPI

As you point out I don't think a new "for profit" organization
would be a good alignment with community goals.

Creating a brand new 501(c)3 is really out of the question -- the
administrative burden is immense.

A Trade Association *might* make sense, but it would only be
possible if Cognitect felt this would be a good idea. It's important
to remember that Trade Associations (e.g. the Linux Foundation)
are responsible to their members (not the community) and that
gives them a substantially different flavor.

Joining a fiscal sponsorship organization like SFC or SPI is
the most sensible thing for a community project to do.
These organizations do, as you suggest, take on much of the burden
of administrating donations and expenses so that developers can
concentrate on hacking.

I don't know (but I'll ask) how SFC handles a prospective project
with a code base that uses copyright aggregation as Clojure does.

As @richhickey is the Clojure copyright holder I think any fiscal
sponsorship application would want to include a statement from Rich on
his feelings and desired relationship with the proposed community
organization. Even before that I wonder if Rich has any thoughts on
all this???

In any case I thank you for thinking of the community and
I'm confident we'll figure out how to address the needs you
raise (with or without a new fiscal sponsorship organization)!

And if you've made it to end of this long rant I want to thank
@richhickey (and all the contributors) for Clojure: every time I have
to jump back to Common Lisp I thank Rich for making elegant,
opinionated decisions that make coding a joy!

Regards,

--Tom


[0] http://sfconservancy.org/members/apply/
[1] http://spi-inc.org/
[2] http://dev.clojure.org/display/community/Clojure+Community+Organisation
[3] https://google-melange.appspot.com/gsoc/document/show/gsoc_program/google/gsoc2015/help_page
[4] https://www.gnome.org/outreachy/
[5] https://github.com/ato/clojars-web/wiki/About
[6] http://conj.io/contributing
[7] http://clojure-conj.org/grants
[8] https://thestrangeloop.com/attendees/diversity-scholarships
[9] http://www.clojurebridge.org/
[10] http://bridgefoundry.org/
[11] https://twitter.com/ClojureBridgeMN
[12] https://github.com/clojurebridge

[myriam abramson]

I did ask Peter Norvig to show support for Clojure with simple programs like he did with his Python spellchecker. He could even use Clojure for a new edition of AIMA. But I am not sure he is going to do that.

[Alex Miller]

Re gsoc, last year Cognitect was a receiving organization for the funds and distributed them to students for travel to Clojure conferences. This incurs some cost on Cognitect for the accounting effort but overall seemed worth it. We also offer free tickets to all gsoc students for any Clojure conf we run. We are happy to keep doing this but would be happier to be more out of the loop on money issues if there was some org that could act in this capacity.

Re the Cognitect position on this stuff, I forwarded it to the appropriate people - I don't yet have anything to share.

Alex

[Mikera]

This is a great initiative. Would love to see an "official" community organisation.

Some things I think are particularly important on the content side:

a) Maintain and improve the clojure.org website as the "front page" for the community

b) Produce "official" user guides and documentation for Clojure (and key contrib libraries, as appropriate)

c) Maintain a "curated" list of recommend tools / libraries / frameworks  (ideally with some expert commentary on when they should be used). should include stuff like Ring etc.

d) Maintain a directory of links to other useful content (videos, tutorials, tools like cross-clj etc.) 

All of these I feel are very important for continued Clojure adoption. There are a lot of good resources already, but they are quite fragmented and difficult for a beginner to navigate. From the point of view of engaging the community to held develop all this content, I strongly believe an "official" organisation would be much more likely to attract good content contributions.

On the administrative and operational side, I think the organisation could take over some key tasks (I'm assuming the people who currently do this would be willing to either hand these over or become part of the organisation team):

a) Maintaining CLAs

b) Development process and tools (Github org, clojure-dev, JIRA etc.)

c) Conference sponsorship

d) Programmes like GSoC etc.

Just some ideas, hope they are useful!

[Daniel Compton]

Hi Alex

Has Cognitect had any further discussion on this/do you have anything to share?

Thanks, Daniel.

[Alex Miller]

Thanks for the ping - I don't think I ever heard anything back but I will ping again.

Alex

[Daniel Compton]

Hi Alex

Following up on this, is there anything else you can share?

Thanks, Daniel.

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Daniel

[Alex Miller]

I don't think we have any official position on it, but I can respond to various items that have been mentioned above in the thread:

1) Google Summer of Code - we (Cognitect) are again acting as a receiver of stipends and distributor of travel funds this year but would happily let another org do that instead.  Cognitect currently provides free tickets for GSOC students to attend once conference in the year following their participation, and we would be happy to continue doing so.

2) clojure.org / documentation - we are very far along in the process of open sourcing the content on http://clojure.org. All of the content for the new version of the site is available at http://github.com/clojure/clojure-site and open for contributions via pull request. There are a bunch of issues there with things to do if you want to help. I am spending most of my time right now finalizing the staging/deployment/ci infrastructure for that and it is inching ever closer to being ready to go live as the real site.

3) CLAs, github, jira, confluence, hudson - Cognitect does not have plans to give up control of these sites. Community members have rights to access these sites already. I have spent a fair amount of time moving towards hosted cloud versions of some of these in the last couple months - the work involved is ... painful. Once clojure.org is live, I plan to put these back on priority list.

4) Conferences - Cognitect has no plans to give up the organization of the three Clojure conferences we run (Clojure/Conj, Clojure/West, and EuroClojure). Other people or organizations are of course welcome and encouraged to create their own events - we already have great ones like ClojureEx, clojureD, ClojuTre, Clojure Remote, etc.

5) Clojars - seems to have had a pretty successful time in seeking sponsors for their ongoing support, which is great! This is a community resource and I'm glad to see the community supporting it.

6) ClojureBridge - now has the ability to receive funds (go donate!) and manage things via the Bridge Foundry.

Given all that, it's not clear to me what role a Clojure community organization would play. I think figuring out the goal is obviously the important part.

On Thursday, December 10, 2015 at 2:36:06 PM UTC-6, Daniel Compton wrote:

Hi Alex

[Devin Walters]

This initiative seems overdue by a couple years. I would like to offer some non-trivial portion of my time. Is there anywhere people could donate to ensure this becomes a valuable and positive community reality?

--

[Toby Crawley]

I've been discussing with Tom Marble the feasibility of putting
Clojars under the umbrella of the Software Freedom Conservancy, since
it has an OSS codebase (which is a requirement for the SFC, and
something that is lacking from the CCO proposal, since moving Clojure
itself under the SFC isn't an option). If Clojars is accepted to the
SFC, it would allow us to take larger donations and corporate
sponsorships. I expect we would have more money than we need for
Clojars itself (we are approaching that now with the BountySource
campaign), and I intend to use the extra money to fund development of
other OSS tools in the Clojure community.

We would also be willing to take over handing the GSoC funds (again,
assuming we get accepted into the SFC).

If a community organization comes into existence in the future, we
would be willing to hand GSoC fund management over, and potentially
direct our extra funds that way as well. Basically, I see
Clojars-as-a-community-organization as a stepping stone to a broader
community organization, if anyone ever takes that step.

I'm working on the SFC application now, and just have a few more
questions to answer. Once that is done, we'll be on the list for
consideration by the SFC Evaluation Committee, and should be evaluated
in the next couple of months.

Devin: I have a few questions for the application that I'm hoping you
can help with, since they relate to the redesign work you were
involved in last year. I'll send them off-list.