Announcing the Rails activists
Posted by Mike Gunderloy January 05, 2009 @ 04:52 PM
Bringing Rails and Merb together is about more than just merging the respective code. We’re also picking up the best ideas from both communities beyond the code. Following on Merb’s success in offering a strong evangelism effort, we’re pleased to announce the creation of the Rails activists:
The mission of the Rails activists is to empower and support the worldwide network of Ruby on Rails users. We do this by publicizing Rails, making adoption easier, and enhancing developer support.
At launch, we’ve identified seven areas where the Rails activists can contribute to the Rails ecosystem:
- Public Relations with media of all sizes
- Ombudsman work to ensure good user-to-user support
- Community Leadership at events and conferences
- Media Organization to help create good promotional opportunities
- Website maintenance
- Documentation efforts
- Developer support
The initial members of the Rails activists are Gregg Pollack, Matt Aimonetti, Ryan Bates, and Mike Gunderloy. But we can’t do all this alone, nor do we want to! Our vision includes a large and vibrant Rails network composed of other activists, bloggers, event hosts, authors, and developers. Our intent is to provide connections, resources, and support to help the entire ecosystem to grow. To start things off, we’re bringing in a lot of our own projects, including videos, screencasts, case studies, Rails documentation, and more – we’re a working group, and we hope you’ll work with us.
If you have ideas about improving the Rails community, projects you want to participate in, or are just looking for ways to get involved, get in touch with us! There are a lot of ways to do that:
- Through the new Rails activism Google group.
- Through the Rails feedback site, where you can vote on which projects you’d like to see us devote resources to in the Rails 3 timeframe and beyond.
- Through our Twitter accounts (linked above)
- Through IRC to Matt (mattetti) or Mike (mikeg1a)
- Through email to Mike Gunderloy, Matt Aimonetti, Gregg Pollack, or Ryan Bates.
We look forward to hearing from you!
For additional perspectives from the activists, see the posts by Gregg Pollack, Matt Aimonetti, and Mike Gunderloy.
Photo by Flickr user caravinagre
I like it, I like it a lot.
Nice.
It is really good to see some real managing behind this really good product. I am looking forward to see where I can add my 20 cents too. Cheers for the effort and the time spent on this entire mission.
I’m not being personal here (I like you guys!), but I’m looking at this from a totally objective, operational standpoint.
I’m not sure I totally get the purpose of this whole thing other than to elevate certain names above others…? Why not just have a loose group of people handle this instead of installing people to “manage” it? Hasn’t Rails come this far without some small set of people driving its promotion? And while I’m seriously glad to have Mike’s documentation patches and guides, Ryan’s screencasts, and Jason’s and Matt’s blogging and training efforts, there are a lot of people who blog and push Rails in places just as much or more than these guys. It just seems rather arbitrary.
I don’t know. Maybe we’re at a stage where we need something “official” like this for some reason. It just seems like a superfluous bit of bureaucracy to manage to me. Setup the user voice, setup a mailing list, and let people go at it. I don’t see the need for some official crack team of evangelists other than to make another target for stupid Django fanboy critics to beat up on. :P My point is: I’d like to hear more about the thought process. I’m curious.
I don’t get it.
Jeremy & rtalker: Believe me, we discussed some of those concerns internally at length before this effort was launched. I think the proof will be in the results: this is an experiment in seeing whether a small group can help pull together some of the energy that we know is out there, and help it succeed. If the experiment fails, then I expect the Activists group will just wither away.
But our goal is to be enablers and supporters and resource finders, for the most part. We don’t want to replace the current many avenues of Rails promotion, but to bring more on to the scene. There does seem to be a reservoir of willing hands for this: we’ve spent the afternoon fielding ideas and requests from people who do want to help, and don’t currently have a project to help on.
We’re “activists” rather than “evangelists” for a reason. This isn’t an effort to go out and convert the heathens and convince them that Rails is the one true way; it’s an effort to help Rails be the best way that it can be. As we said, this will be a community effort (or it won’t happen at all). So, if you’re skeptical: give us a few months to see what we can do, get involved yourself in shaping the direction of the activism efforts, and then let us know how it looks.
Gregg had it on a Rails Envy podcast a couple weeks ago, but there is an effort underway to get an english Rails magazine together. Could be another venue for some activism or collaboration.
John: thanks, you beat me to this :-).
I’d like to participate in this effort on behalf of Rails Magazine.
Rails Magazine (http://railsmagazine.com) is a soon to be launched English-language, free periodical dedicated to the Ruby on Rails community. While the magazine is not very visible at the moment, there is heavy activity going on preparing the first issues.
We are similarly coordinating powerful community voices; the mission and approach for Rails Magazine already has a large activism component, and I can see how coordinating these disparate efforts could be very powerful in publicizing Rails and helping the community.
I’d be happy to explore ways we could help the community and participate in this initiative.
Jeremy: good points, and only time will tell how good an idea this is. I doubt this will go in a wrong direction though, as the whole initiative needs the community approval and support in the long run to be successful.
Good idea!
Ruby on rails is great for making a framework for social networks. I will make my first steps in the next days!
I’m a regular Rails user. You may not know me, but between conferences, books, screencasts, and hosting I’ve spent thousands of dollars of my own money on Rails over the years. I’ve also promoted it at my workplace. We will soon have our first Rails app up and running—a CRM system.
I do not need “enablers and supporters and resource finders.” I need documentation like this:
http://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/
Everything else is bullshit.
But you know that.
The “Merb absorbed by Rails” announcement is even more mind blowing given the controversial sole “Ruby of Rails” trademark ownership by DHH.
Participating in an open source project that has a singly owned trademark means that all your additions will be, in essence owned by DHH.
It’s hard to conceive in assisting ‘Rails Activation’ under these terms.
How do you figure that your contributions will be owned by DHH? That makes no sense. The license is MIT and contributors retain copyright ownership.
Ethan: do you not think that guides.rubyonrails.org is good documentation?
Rails is cool man. I used to just work on Java proj with Spring and Hibernate and then i get a chance to see how rad ruby is. Congradulashons on your accomplishments men!
What wonder!
Yay activism! Yay making it easier!
That’s the spirit in which I wrote this little ecommerce guide for everyone & especially Ruby/Rails peeps (with ActiveMerchant samples):
http://jumpstartcc.com/
I’d like to chip in :)
Ethan – If you liked the Django Book and the Merb Book, I think you’ll be pleased by some of the upcoming documentation efforts in the 2.3 to 3.0 timeframe. Meanwhile, if there’s something in particular that you’re finding lacking in the RDoc and Rails Guides, we’d love to know what it is.
Hmmmm – I do not think you are properly reading the implications of the trademark. If you’d like to bring your concerns to the rails-activism list, we’d be happy to discuss (even though that’s a bit off our core topics).