Which categories to create in the site

It looks good to me, actually I get a little busy these days, would be
happy to transfer the maintenance to people who are interested, let me know
what I can help the transition!

Hosting Bucklescript and jsoo conversations here seems fine to me. Given there are no other discussion forums for it, I could create a category for it. It would be helpful if you could first create a post for the forum that describes it, points to online resources, and then I can pin that to the category.

I’ve created a basic post about Lwt (About Lwt…). Can you please pin it?

By the way, I wanted to just call it “About Lwt,” but there is a 15-character minimum limit on the post title. That does seem too restrictive to me, though I’m sure it’s not the biggest issue for the Discourse site right now.

I’ve gone ahead and created an Lwt category, which should nicely alongside the Core/Async them. For both of them, now would be a good time to direct users from your respective README/websites to point them to the category topic here.

Yes, let’s use tags for the finer classification. Note also how classification has multiple “axes”, like how tags can indicate level (“beginner”, “advanced”, …), solution status (“solved”, “open-problem”, …), etc.

As for the category name, I think “questions” still narrows down the category, as this could also be a place for posting and discussing papers or tutorials on functional programming, or sharing OCaml specific techniques like ways to enrich typing or use the module system, that may not be well known. So, well, the scope would be broader than what you originally signed up for.

Discourse has a plugin to mark questions solved.

I personally don’t see much use in tagging questions with difficulty level. The only one I can think of is it can be used generate some statistics yearly or something apart from that. Am I missing something obvious?

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Repost here: What about an Announcements category?

(Thanks @vramana for linking this thread)

Done! About BuckleScript , a dedicated
category for discussions about bucklescript is highly appreciated

Thanks for that. I’ll edit the README in a day or two – a bit overwhelmed at the moment. /cc @mfp

There’s no rush whatsoever; thanks for all the detailed posts so far!

I’ve put this in a sub-category of Web so we can experiment with that (and add a jsoo subcategory if there is demand for that). Let us know how that works out…

Over all I’m with @dbuenzli on this. Let it grow organically.

But it would be nice to have something (topic, thread, … ) about collaboration and requests for help on projects.

It’d be nice if as a community we highlighted and supported ecosystem-critical projects.

I just had almost the exact same idea: A “Contribution” category where maintainers can post contribution opportunities, potential contributors can ask questions, coordinate etc. and with an about sticky providing general tips for contributing.

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I’m +1 on a “contribution” category, and am willing to try to do one for MirageOS. There is also the OCaml Labs compiler hacking event thread where a list of things to work on for that have been posted.

I’ll create this Contribution category as as a sub-category of Community for the moment, as it’s pretty much about making easy entry points for newcomers. Any suggestions for the name of the category? “Contributions” might be made a little clearer – we use the term “junior jobs” in OCaml mantis, and “pioneer projects” in MirageOS. None of these leap out as good category names to me…

What about “jobs”?
And “Web/Ocsigen” :slight_smile:
and a tag “mobile” .

“Opportunities” could cover everything from unpaid contributions to permanent positions.

On the other hand, I like the idea of “pioneer projects”, as I think it would be nice to have a place to document what we’re missing in the OCaml ecosystem. That is, a permanet place to post request for implementation protocols, bindings, or other libraries, as well as assemble people who might be interested in contributing. A topic would typically start of with a more or less vague request and initial search for existing projects, then turn into a discussion of specifications and interface, and “terminate” with a link to a project page.

Maybe the same category could also serve as an index for existing implementations, but this may be stretching the purpose of discourse. There is also https://www.openhub.net/, dedicated to that kind of information, though it only helps if the majority of OCaml projects where registered there.

I’ve added Web/Ocsigen category now and moved the other two posts into it. You should be able to create tags yourself; I’ve bumped up your user to the maximum ‘trust level’ (which otherwise comes with time and activity) to ensure that you have enough rights to do that.

As far as toplevel categories go, I really like ‘opportunities’. If it gets busy enough, we could create sub-categories for jobs, pioneer projects and other things, but for now we could start off with just that category at the toplevel. If there are no objections in the next few days I’ll do this.

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Thank you for the category (and the trust :wink: )!

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“Opportunities” seems like a very passive name, like it would be more of a read-only than a read-write category, at least from the perspective of a potential contributor. It doesn’t invite people who are seeking advice on how to contribute. “Contribution” is more general, but perhaps too general. “Open Source” or “Open Source Contribution” is slightly more specific. “Getting involved” is more engaging, but perhaps still too vague.

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