Which categories to create in the site

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.

3 Likes

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.

1 Like

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

1 Like

“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.

2 Likes

Visiting the site as a non-logged user, in a fresh browser, I see that About Core/Async is pinned to the top of the topic list, with three lines of description preview. Meanwhile, About Multicore, About Web Development, About BuckleScript, etc., including (of course :slight_smile: ) About Lwt, are littered in the ordinary topic list, without any preview. They do, however, have a little pin.

Are these topics pinned at different levels, like Core/Async has some kind of site-wide pin, while the rest have category-level pins? Is this a problem with my client? If not, and this is not intentional, I think we should give all of these the same rank.

Yeah it was pinned globally. I have pinned it just to its Category now.

1 Like

Thanks! That was my mistake – the intention is to have all the pinned posts for categories have equal ranking. I’d like to eventually have a single global pinned post as the “Welcome to the forums” post with links to all the categories.

There was a discussion on the private ocaml slack channel about adding a section regarding papers (if people are interested). Something where relevant papers can be posted and discussed, explained, pre-reviewed, and where the discussions can be human readable also for non academically cs-trained people.I think that such section is probably of interest to more people than me and I don’t think it would start by itself until it is clear that there are accessible discussions on papers (I did not notice the one on multicore for example until it was posted on slack).

On thing that I like of the slack channels is that papers are often posted. As an example, there was a very nice and readable one about the use of algebraic effects to implement exceptions and concurrency. This was not directly about OCaml, but was really interesting and well written, and probably relevant in view of Multicore (I know, it’s a bad example, we are back to multicore :P).

Having a papers category could push people to post these kind of things here and start some interesting discussions and/or clarifications. But we have to see first if there is enough interest

1 Like

A category ‘compiler’ or ‘compiler internal’ but I am not sure if there will be enough people interested in it.

2 Likes

Would a “containers” category make sense? There’s a low-traffic mailing list, but the barrier to entry would be definitely lower here… And I could use an “About containers” sticky post, too, for beginners.

5 Likes

Yes please! This is so much better than a mailing list. And concentrating discussion in one place means more traffic, which benefits everyone.

Well you are more than welcome to start posting papers and use a tag for this. (Not clear why a new category would be needed for this, isn’t it what tags are for?)

1 Like