[General] Lurkers and Shirkers: we need workers!

Dan Ingalls Dan.Ingalls at Sun.com
Sun Nov 8 19:24:36 CET 2009


Hi, Phil and all -

>Here are some key points. Anyone want to discuss?
>
>1.  Evagelism
>2.  Funding
>3.   Contests, Incentive

Thanks for taking a step!

I think there's another item which is a punch list of things that 
need to be done, and a road map or wish list of things that should be 
done or would be fun at least.  Maybe refactor these as a roadmap 
under evangelism, and one more project descriptions designed to get 
people interested and hopefully induce some actual participation.

	4.  Projects

I'm willing to take a first pass at the content for evangelism.  I 
will try to get something out very soon (next day or two) because I 
have another deadline looming that will keep me busy until the end of 
the month.  It would be great if someone else could then pretty it up 
and disseminate it along the lines of Phil's earlier message.

I have two thoughts about ways to generate interest and possibly even funding:


Interest:
I was going to do this last year but I ran out of time.  Sadly the 
timing is really tight again, but...
The idea is to do an Advent Calendar in Lively Kernel.  This was done 
once in Squeak and it was a *lot* of fun.  The idea is that there is 
a front page with 25 places you can click, but you can only look@
the first N of them on December Nth.  It has the following virtues...

	It's a time when people are looking for distraction
	It's a seasonal topic so easy to "advertise"
	It's an opportunity for lots of simple cute hacks
	It can easily be a tutorial in disguise

Obviously it would be nice to have all the punch list items done 
first, but I think a better strategy at this point is to build some 
momentum and then use the community to do some of the finish work 
(this is why the roadmap is important).  My experience from last year 
is that this is best done in the Lively Wiki.


Funding / incentive
I listen to people groaning about how to become an iPhone developer 
and how to break into the iPhone app marketing engine, and yet Lively 
Kernel apps run just fine in the iPhone with no need for Flash and no 
interference from Apple.

What if, at the end of the Advent Calendar, there were a way to join 
an LK Wiki and be able to save your fun hacks and useful apps that 
could run on iPhone (and others).  If we could pull off the calendar 
project, we could rally a lot of attention.


I'll try to put together some text for a WikiPedia page and roadmap 
in the next day or two, and maybe people can discuss some more in the 
meantime.

	- Dan
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