A consolidation of communities

proposals
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Hey all. :wave: I’m curious about communication and where things are headed in terms transparency and consistency for the future of the community. For context:

  • Dry RB: Includes it’s own forum, bug tracker, chat (which I don’t believe is recommended anymore), social media, gems (some of which are being folded further into Hanami), etc.
  • ROM: Uses it’s own forum and different structure for guides.
  • Hanami: Includes this forum, chat (Gitter), bug tracker, guides, social media, etc.

Since more of Dry RB is being folded into Hanami (example: Dry View => Hanami View) and ROM is being used for the persistence layer, would it be possible to start collapsing and consolidating the projects so it’s easier for newcomers to rapidly grok where to get started and be productive? Additionally, with so many avenues for communication (especially across multiple communities) would it make sense to consolidate so it’s simple to learn and collaborate? Even being purely focused on the forums would be a major boon. For instance, one of the greatest strengths of these communities is the use of the Discourse forums and the encouragement of asynchronous, long form thought, while providing access to advanced search so you can learn quickly and even answer your own question before submitting a duplicate inquiry. There are several other advantages here:

  • Increases transparency because the conversations are public.
  • Improves marketing because of searchability, improved SEO, and more public presence in nature.
  • Maximizes engagement while providing a low barrier to entry.
  • Allows the team to pay attention to a single source of communication which means faster feedback, response time, and higher community engagement.

Anyway, would this be of interest to pursue? I would also suspect, once the initial hurdle of consolidation is tackled, that maintenance across all projects would be reduced as well since everything could be streamlined and optimized?

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I think there’s no point in talking about consolidating the projects, but consolidating the communication, especially forums, sounds like an interesting idea. However, I see why it might be problematic to execute.

Right now these forums are (as far as I can tell) treated as a support area for the projects. That makes their boundaries quite clear: Dry forum provides support for Dry, Hanami forum for Hanami etc. There were some talks some time ago about creating a community focused around these technologies. I don’t remember if it was supposed to be “alt ruby” or “next gen ruby”. But then the boundaries would need to be figured out anew and it’s probably not trivial.

Should it be “Ruby without Rails” forum? Then folks using Dry in Rails project might be feeling not welcome (and Hanami does not want to position itself as “anti-Rails”, as far as I can tell). If it’s just “alternative Ruby stack” - what does it mean? Is Hotwire alternative Ruby stack? Is Phlex?

In general, I support the idea but I see some obstacles which probably need to be addressed first.

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Thanks and agreed, this won’t be a simple task to complete but taking the first step to help improve the community and be a good first step for us all and, yeah, I’ve seen these labels mentioned before:

  • Alt Ruby
  • Next Gen Ruby (Sean had mentioned this one to me as well).

I wouldn’t want to create a riff with Rails, as you hint at, either. I’d rather focus on a better direction for Ruby that pushes people to new limits. I think this is more aligned with the spirit of the Dry, ROM, and Hanami communities in general.

Given the above, I could the see the following happen in a series of steps:

  • Establish an umbrella name/label which encompasses Dry, ROM, and Hanami.
  • This umbrella could be a single forum which means the associated Dry, ROM, and Hanami forums could be decommissioned. This would be a huge boon for folks getting started since they’d have one place to hang out with access to all resources.
  • Eventually – and depending on the success of this endeavor – there could be reason for consolidating all of the projects under the same umbrella. You seem hesistant to pursue this but I think there might be merit in doing this over time. …but starting with forums seems like a good first step.

Regarding naming – which is always hard – I’m not sure use of “Alt” or “Next” fits. It feels…generic. For me, use of “Functional Ruby” seems fitting and nails the essence of what these communities are all about since everything stems from Functional Programming (which nicely blends with Object Oriented Programming in Ruby).

Anyways, some thoughts, but maybe getting more input from people on what the umbrella name/label could be would help if a lot of people think this is a good idea?

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