How do we build a more coherent community around Cobalt?

Another cross post, but I think this question applies to users and devs alike.

I spoke with Julian Lombardi and Mark McCahill yesterday about this briefly, but I'd like to solicit a community opinion.

How do we build a coherent community around Cobalt?

My first suggestion was to have an open Wiki--not closed like Croquet's wiki.

My next suggestion was to have discussion forums where end users can ask and get answers to questions. That format lends itself well to community support. Instead of answering the same question 50 times, school the newbs for a post or two and they quickly learn to fend for themselves. Ubuntu forums is a shining example of a successful forum community.

Other ideas?

-Matt

Great Matt,

In the spirit of brainstorming (and possibly not worth considering for the Cobalt project) .... Their may be an interest in a Cobalt social Ning network (both for the early adopters as well as prospective developers).  These little networks are pretty flexible and really give a sense of community to a project.... just as an example take a peak at the Classroom 2.0 network here http://www.classroom20.com

I am looking forward to contributing to the Cobalt project and introducing it to our students throughout Kansas.

Cheers,
Rich

============
============

I think Josh nailed it in his response to how the Croquet community  
communicates. We need much more openness and communication. If an  
open Wiki and discussion forums help with that then I'm all for it.  
How many people on this list are actively developing in Croquet right  
now? How can we better pool our collective knowledge and experiences?  
What can we do in the short-term to make Croquet development less  
scary to someone downloading Cobalt for the first time?

-Peter

On Mar 5, 2008, at 8:03 AM, Matthew Schmidt wrote:

On Wed, Mar 05, 2008 at 11:35:19AM -0600, Peter Moore wrote:
> I think Josh nailed it in his response to how the Croquet community
> communicates. We need much more openness and communication. If an open Wiki
> and discussion forums help with that then I'm all for it. How many people
> on this list are actively developing in Croquet right now? How can we
> better pool our collective knowledge and experiences? What can we do in the
> short-term to make Croquet development less scary to someone downloading
> Cobalt for the first time?

I'm not a Croquet developer, but I do know there is a need for
more communication. Come hang out on the irc channel #croquet at
freenode. We croquet fans from the squeak.org community created
it and have discussions there sometimes. The more people join,
the more useful it will be.

The squeak irc portal has info on how to access the irc network:
http://wiki.squeak.org/squeak/IRCPortal

just substitute #squeak with #croquet and the instructions
still apply.

--
Matthew Fulmer -- http://mtfulmer.wordpress.com/
Help improve Squeak Documentation: http://wiki.squeak.org/squeak/808

On Wed, Mar 05, 2008 at 10:43:56AM -0700, Matthew Fulmer wrote:
> I'm not a Croquet developer, but I do know there is a need for
> more communication. Come hang out on the irc channel #croquet at

Apropos, can someone rein in the Wikipedia juggernaut?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cobalt_croquet

--
Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org
______________________________________________________________
ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com http://postbiota.org
8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A  7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE

Regarding Ning ...
My concerns may be unfounded, but because of Google's name recognition and pedigree, their Google Groups may have more access for those inside more secure systems than the obviously social chatty Ning site.

We can regularly check our growing community's accessibility to Ning and review if its worth switching. I propose we stay with the Cobalt Google Groups for now.

What community functionality do you think important for us which Ning provides and which we couldn't preform to some degree or another with Google Groups discussion forum, Google Groups pages (like a wiki), and Google Docs for spreadsheets, documents, and presentation?

Cheers,
Darius

Darius

I'm part of a growing community in 'Wikieducator.org' which has a great way of
bringing in new people by giving online workshops for wiki skills in exchange
for a donation of teaching resources.  It could be a good way to bring
Croquet/Cobalt into this community and build tutorials at the same time...
Feel free to look at my page at www.wikieducator.org/User:Srasporich

Regards,
Stefan Rasporich

Peter Moore wrote: sure it is an interesting feature, and I do agree it could be an
interesting option. But IMHO the long-term architecture should be just
like the WWW, with some service like DNS able to associate and route
metaverse hyperlinks (VerseLinks?) to the correct servers.. the WWW is a
winning architecture and is MASSIVE, and one day this metaverse stuff
will be as massive as the WWW. So, let's start with the right foot. I
don't know Jabber: could it keep on his "discovery features" with 100,
1000, 10^4, 10^5, 10^6 servers each one hosting his metaverse? If yes,
go for it. If not, it is a short-term solution - which means it is GREAT
and probably could be the right thing for a while, and Croquet could
build on it and become a more and more mature framework, but a day we
will have to abandon it to get the massive performance we will need.
BTW, this is why I DONT believe in centralized stuff like SecondLife...
the "mainframe" model is dead a lot of time ago, and should be avoided
if not absolutely needed (the only reason for which SL needed such a
central "grid" is the "economical" part, I think... they need to control
the economical value of virtual objects and the virtual/real money
roundtrip). The very idea of a "map" should be avoided IMHO.

As with the WWW, the important thing is not having an explicit list of
metaverses, but some mechanism to traverse and search for and eventually
reach interesting ones. You don't have a list of all people using
Firefox now. Let's use Cobalt for what it is (a browser) and move the
Net Complexity outside of it.

> The real power of Cobalt/Croquet is that *anyone* can create a space
> that other people can join, but only if people know where to go. That
> is what Jabber provides. I think it was David Smith who called IM the
> "dial-tone of Croquet". If we want a persistent meeting space who is
> going to host it? Who is going to maintain it? I think the Croquet
> Collaborative was a good example of how difficult this can be.
It seems to me like internet before the WWW. Do you remember the
gophers? How did WWW emerged, after NCSA Mosaic was born? we just have
to replicate the same steps, we are in the same exact situation. But now
we know DNS works... :)

If you need persistent metaverses, metaverse service providers will
come. Many of us have persistent WWW personal sites, why should be this
metaverse stuff different? The first one that will do the Google of
Metaverses will make money, I say...

And, thank everybody for this messages. It is so many years I was
waiting for these days, and reading such a competent and stimulating
mailing list... it seems to me to be back in 1990, but now we have
technology and power and we can REALLY build on it.

Babele Dunnit

Thanks to everyone for their input on this. It looks like, for the short term, we will be putting together a portal site that will contain the following elements:

- A community-editable wiki, probably based on Mediawiki

- Discussion forums, probably based on JForum

- Information on how to connect and participate with the IRC channel

- A Jabber chat server (details TBD)

Clearly this is all very preliminary and will need to be fleshed out more as we start putting this infrastructure together.

Long term, the goal is pretty clear that people want to use Cobalt as the community collaboration tool.

On Mar 6, 2008, at 4:20 AM, Aaron Brancotti wrote:

It wouldn't need to. The www analogy is a good one and I agree that  
this will be how well known virtual spaces work. But we can also  
leverage services like AIM and Jabber to form ad-hoc communities of  
virtual spaces without the need to register a domain or run a server.  
The question was how do we as a small community better communicate  
and I think leveraging IM infrastructure to connect our virtual  
spaces is a neat solution.

Mark McCahill responded to this on the dev list and makes some good  
points: https://lists.duke.edu/sympa/arc/croquet-dev/2008-03/ 
msg00032.html

> If yes, go for it. If not, it is a short-term solution - which  
> means it is GREAT and probably could be the right thing for a  
> while, and Croquet could build on it and become a more and more  
> mature framework, but a day we will have to abandon it to get the  
> massive performance we will need.

I think it is a long term solution to a particular problem and can co-
exist with what you want.

> BTW, this is why I DONT believe in centralized stuff like  
> SecondLife... the "mainframe" model is dead a lot of time ago, and  
> should be avoided if not absolutely needed (the only reason for  
> which SL needed such a central "grid" is the "economical" part, I  
> think... they need to control the economical value of virtual  
> objects and the virtual/real money roundtrip). The very idea of a  
> "map" should be avoided IMHO.
>

I strongly agree. No need to impose arbitrary spacial relationships  
between spaces.

> As with the WWW, the important thing is not having an explicit list  
> of metaverses, but some mechanism to traverse and search for and  
> eventually reach interesting ones. You don't have a list of all  
> people using Firefox now. Let's use Cobalt for what it is (a  
> browser) and move the Net Complexity outside of it.
>

You don't need a list of people using Firefox because the web is a  
single user experience. When is the last time you ran into a friend  
of yours on Wikipedia? ;-) Cobalt is different.

I am a Gopher. ;-)

Thank you for participating.

> Babele Dunnit
>
>
>

Hi Matt,

I'm really happy to see that this action with Cobalt is really happening as we had previous conversation about something like it.

The technical details about the PreCobalt communication looks like got to the conclusion and I'm looking forward to see the portal and have all those channels for communicate.

As I see there are some of you who actually put Cobalt together and others who keen to contribute but have less or minimal knowledge about squeak, programming etc.

It's one of my goal to learn from you guys programming, developing Cobalt to power our developer and user network.

I think it is a great opportunity doing the Cobalt development in a training process that nurtures the new users and developers.

I think forming WorkGoups, figuring out who can lead and teach others, who wants to learn etc. are the first steps.

I feel by doing this will build a coherent community around Cobalt.


Thanks for your activity!

Attila



    

 



  


 

Thanks to everyone for their input on this. It looks like, for the short term, we will be putting together a portal site that will contain the following elements:


- A community-editable wiki, probably based on Mediawiki

- Discussion forums, probably based on JForum

- Information on how to connect and participate with the IRC channel

- A Jabber chat server (details TBD)

Clearly this is all very preliminary and will need to be fleshed out more as we start putting this infrastructure together.

Long term, the goal is pretty clear that people want to use Cobalt as the community collaboration tool.

---

Climb to the top of the charts! Play the word scramble challenge with star power. Play now!

well I suppose I should chime in.

Every good community needs a T shirt and hat :) 

a placeholder for the idea:

http://i273.photobucket.com/albums/jj228/waufrepi/CobaltT.jpg

then perhaps donate the profits to the OLPC foundation. 

           wfpi

Where's the rabbit?

Regards,
Les H
On Thu, 2008-04-03 at 19:02 -0400, waufrepi III wrote:

To have a T-shirt is   very important for the sucess of any software product
:-)
My sugestion is to sell also a "pom-pom" - like that used by the "Playboy
bunnies" - to be used glued to the "Cobalteers"' pants.
A tribute to Mr. Rabbit, our main male avatar.
The color will be cobalt, off course...

waufrepi III wrote: I like the T-shirt idea :) Things like that help develop a sense of
community.

I have just created a brand new Croquet forum on croqueteers.com
direct link: http://croqueteers.com/forum/

Please, suggest ideas, use it, collaborate, be a community!

(Not that I think these lists are bad, but as mentioned before in the
community thread here on this list, good forums and a wiki would be
essential tools in building a community. I hope I'm not upsetting any
one by pushing forward with all this so aggressively, I just really want
to get a good community going with tools that are more accessible to the
common people. Remember any of you can suggest/change any thing for both
the wiki and the forums. I want to do this as open as  humanly possible.)

Maybe this should be posted on the croquet-user list as well, since
users can request help there, but I'll leave that to someone else, I
don't want to spam the lists with my stuff.

The forum sections and boards are just a draft really, what I could come
up with as I did the initial install. If any of you feel like there's
something there which shouldn't be there, or if there's something not
there which should be there, let me know and I'll make the modifications.

-John Sennesael