Social Racket Council?

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Hi

The idea of a ‘Social Racket Council‘ was raised in the Racket Town Hall at RacketCon (https://youtube.com/watch?v=73dDj_z66qo&feature=share at 56:10)

Any ideas on how this could work?

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I think something like this could be a great idea. Note that I'm not actually contributing any ideas. :slight_smile:

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I think something like this could be a great idea. Note that I'm not actually contributing any ideas

I brought it up and Stephen points to when I bring it up. When I spoke to this, I had two different ideas in mind when I used “social”:

  1. Stephen has organized many events and competitions for the Racket community. Jay (and before him many others) have organized RacketCon, which was our main event for the longest time. I am grateful to everyone who has worked on various aspects of “community”, and I have observed that people “burn out” on these.

So, I imagined that Stephen — for example — could form a team of volunteers who could share the burden and the camaraderie. He’d ask for volunteers, perhaps for specific recurring tasks or for just available. This team could meet on a regular basis (twice a year, every week, whatever) to brainstorm what could benefit the Racket community. Some subset of the team could then organize the event. Presumably tasks would rotate.

  1. The other aspect is on the technical-social side. As I tried to explain, we — the core team — are researchers who perform research-level design, implementation, evaluation, etc. on Racket. Here are some random examples; syntax/parse, contracts, types, set-based expanders, submodules, drracket, steppers. I am sure you can refine and think of more, but you can also see that these rather novel ideas demand significant investment of research time.

Language design and use comes with other tasks, however. Racket programmers discover inconveniences; think of the non-uniformity of some functions or the repo servers incompleteness. They notice the absence of libraries that are common in other language communities; just recently someone bemoaned the lack of a mechanism for visualizing very large data sets as tables. I am sure people can think of more examples here.

It doesn’t take the desire to do long-term research on some topic to help out with these aspects of the language. It is service and also the joy of helping others. But again, being alone and without direct connection to like-minded people can cause fatigue.

For this aspect, I had thought of people like Jens who manages the math package and Alex who manages the plot package and several others who have contributed many packages. They could form a team that meets and exchanges thoughts on package management, programming inconveniences that could be RFCed, missing libraries, core-vs-package issues, service problems with the package server, and probably things that I am just not imagining now.

My thinking is that if they met every month or other month at their convenience, they could share experiences and focus the spotlight on issues that we overlook.

;; - - -

As these teams grow and consolidate, I’d see responsibility for the Racket ecosystem moving from the core group to these teams. We (the core team) would still contribute long-term (months, years) to design/implementation issues, but the teams would own more of the language and its environment.

Perhaps I am dreaming here but I was dreaming when I launched it all in 1995 — Matthias

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Given that you spend some time (along with several others, of course) on socials: what would be helpful to you?

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The two foci Matthias highlights reflect what is currently happening in the Racket community.

I've focussed on the first because it is fun, I learn a lot and I meet interesting people. It also feels good giving something back after all the answers I've got over the years.

I’d like a calendar of events for 2022 ending with a community led RacketCon.

Let’s do it!

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Sorry,

I should be more specific.

I need

  1. Nominations for events over the year.
  2. Breakdown of the tasks to run a RacketCon. ( so the load can be shared)

We can use this thread to start with, and follow up with a meet-up-Saturday 6pm UTC

2021-12-11T18:00:00Z

Best wishes

Stephen

PS When this thread becomes too noisy for the mailing list we can set up a private category on Discourse for participants

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