Join forces?

[Geert Claes]

On forum.world.st there already are groups like SCONA for North America and ESUG which initially was European but now actually more or less acts on a global scale when it comes to promoting Smalltalk (e.g. Google Summer of Code).  Whilst any initiative is great I wonder whether it would be a better idea to join forces there?

The World of Smalltalk (world.st) is an initiative that I started but it is now sponsored by ESUG.  The goal of the World of Smalltalk is to be a one-stop-portal (without advertising) with a collection of all relevant Smalltalk resource out there be it books, videos, presentations, events, smalltalk implementations, frameworks and tools ...

All info is available on the site as well as via the following subdomains:

Books: books.world.st

Implementations: implementations.world.st links to all Smalltalk vendors and open source implementations

Forums: forum.world.st still trying to get it to work with usenets as well so Dolphin can be added as well

Videos: media.world.st Pharocasts, James' Videos, Smalltalk Medicine Show and Gemstone videos

Code: code.world.st at the moment this is SqueakSource

Blog aggregate: planet.world.st which currently simply redirects to planet.smalltalk.org

Cheers, Geert

[Sean Allen]

Some general thoughts from me.

ESUG has an awesome list going. SCONA is basically a dead list which
is sad but sort of reflects how
Smalltalk is going in the US from a marketing angle. Comparing it to
the Argentine and European lists
is just sad.

I think the point of this list is really to discuss coordinated
marketing of a specific type- that being
ruby style marketing. I would consider this list to be a loose
affiliation of like minded people who
want to work together towards a specific goal in a specific style.

I like world.st but I don't think it fits with my idea of how you
would go about that.
I commend world.st for looking very clean and nice but it isn't really
opinionated.
To me, I think step 1 in trying to get penetration w/ people using
other languages
( and by people I mean younger people ), we need opinionated sites.

I go to it and it says do this, use pharo... here is how you start
with pharo. Here is how
you do X, here is how you do Y. I don't think offering options from
the beginning is a good idea.
I think there should be blam! pow! high quality screencasts of 'do X
in Y minutes' like the
classic rails blog screencast. To me, world.st is a great aggregator
of information but it
isn't doing explicit marketing and I think implicit marketing isn't
working. Explicit marketing
needs to be done.

We need to go to ruby groups and talk. We need to go to conferences
about dynamic languages and talk.
We need to be giving presentation at conferences like Strange Loop,
not Smalltalk Solutions.

I'd love hear others ideas on this. My ideas aren't fully formed and
welcome hearing what you think
and how many people who have signed up on here feel the same as I do
about coming up with
explicit targeting marketing campaigns via websites, conferences, user
groups etc.

-Sean-

[James Robertson]

I agree. I spent a lot of time two years ago in front of Ruby user groups, for instance

James Robertson
http://www.jarober.com
jar...@gmail.com

[Charles A. Monteiro]

Sean:

As per our discussion over beers the other nite , I totally agreed.
I'll reiterate that besides web presence its also important to have a
local presence. That is why I'm pushing the idea of a mini-conf here
in NYC where we put minds of the different dynamic camps i.e.
Smalltalk, Ruby, perhaps Python under the same roof for a day, maybe
there's an angle to including Clojure etc

-Charles