On Sat, Jan 03, 2009 at 12:01:06AM +0000, Jamie Brandon wrote:
The haskell community has a well deserved reputation for being one of the friendliest online communities. Perhaps this would be a good point to figure out what we're doing right? I'm convinced that part of it is that offtopic conversation is encouraged through on haskell-cafe, planet haskell and irc. It makes people seem more human and hence harder to flame.
Jamie
I have no hard data to back this up, but I suspect that another large part of the answer is simply the fact that culture tends to be self-reinforcing. So, as I understand it, we mostly have Shae to thank for very intentionally creating a friendly culture in the first place. Many online communities simply arise without anyone giving much thought to the sort of culture they want to create; empirically, emergent online culture is not so friendly. -Brent