As we sit here riding the Haskell wave: http://www.cse.unsw.edu.au/~dons/tmp/cafe.png with nearly 2000 (!) people reading haskell-cafe@, perhaps its time to think some more about how to build and maintain this lovely Haskell community we have. Just yesterday I received an email: "I posted it to Haskell-Cafe and received loads of brilliant responses. Wow, those guys are awesome. I'm definitely going to learn Haskell now." Which is *exactly* the kind of (view of the) community we want to build and encourage, so we can keep the Haskell project growing into the future. I think the main thing we need to remember is to help train new experts in the community, to be fluent in the culture, ensuring that expertise and a knowledge of the culture diffuses through the new people arriving. That is, to help people progress from newbie, to intermediate, to expert, and thus ensure the culture is maintained (avoiding `Eternal September'). This graphic[1] sums the main issue up nicely, in my view: http://headrush.typepad.com/photos/uncategorized/buildingausercommunity.jpg And the steps to follow (people can think about how best they apply to them) (also from [1]): * Encourage newer users--especially those who've been active askers--to start trying to answer questions We're pretty good with this, but we can be *explicit* about it. If you're taking a lot from the community, please put a lot back in (in terms of writing about it, contributing answers, new libraries, and so on). I note this is also exactly what the Summer of Code helps do too -- we've had several people paid to progress from newbie to expert, thanks to the SoC. * Give tips on how to answer questions Answering politely, and in detail, explaining common misunderstandings is better than one word replies. * Adopt a near-zero-tolerance "Be Nice" policy when people answer questions We are very good here already, both on email and IRC. * Teach and encourage the more advanced users (including moderators) how to correct a wrong answer while maintaining the original answerer's dignity. This is hard, perhaps people can think some more about this. * Re-examine your reward/levels strategy for your community This is also important: on the IRC channel we actually use participation data (http://www.cse.unsw.edu.au/~dons/irc/haskell-07.html) to determine who gets moderator privledges. For the community in general, rewards are along the lines of "going to the hackathon", "becoming the domain expert for some library". Cheers and happy hacking, Don [1]. http://headrush.typepad.com/creating_passionate_users/2006/12/how_to_build_a...