The Model Driven Software Network
Raise your level of abstraction
How can we make this succeed?
Does anybody have any hints for how to get this social network off the ground? Is it just a matter of getting enough people to join until we hit critical mass, or is there anything else we should be doing?
I have a few ideas myself but don't want to prejudice the discussion.
I have a few ideas myself but don't want to prejudice the discussion.
Views: 2
Replies to This Discussion
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Permalink Reply by Michael Osmond on -
I am on a couple of internet groups that appear to be succeeding, each is different but each offers information and answers, a reason for people to look at what's happening. This is either people contributing articles and peices, or that there are people regularly answering straight forward questions. There seems to be a high amount of low level stuff and then some more advanced information.
I don't think it could be just critical mass, I think there needs to be something else that keeps people active.
By the way Mark, why this and not the Forums at your code generation site? Was that not the same thing?
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Permalink Reply by Mark Dalgarno on
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Michael Osmond said:I am on a couple of internet groups that appear to be succeeding, each is different but each offers information and answers, a reason for people to look at what's happening. This is either people contributing articles and peices, or that there are people regularly answering straight forward questions. There seems to be a high amount of low level stuff and then some more advanced information.
I don't think it could be just critical mass, I think there needs to be something else that keeps people active.
OK, thanks for that. Of course the value does come from these sorts of things and it's important not to lose sight of that. I'm planning a wider rollout of the site in January so hopefully we will see more people joining and contributing.
Michael Osmond said:By the way Mark, why this and not the Forums at your code generation site? Was that not the same thing?
I see this site as offering many more capabilities for mutual interaction than the existing forums and using richer media. For example I've seen other networks make use of live chat capabilities to have real-time interaction - something that isn't possible with the existing forums. Given that Ning (the platform on which the site is based) is a commercial service I hope that we'll see further features come along in the future - something I am less confident about for the existing forums. I also get the feeling that there's a lot more possibilities for one-to-one interaction that doesn't happen through the forums, hopefully this will help people make connections and get more value from the site. Finally, I feel this will be an easier to administer platform and given that it is a hosted service it should be easier to keep spammers out.
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Permalink Reply by Rui Curado on -
(I wrongly posted this on your page, so I put it now in the right place to be....)
To help this community, the first step we all can do is to start showing our MDSN membership in our blogs. I've already done that on my blog at ruicurado.com.
On our MDSN personal page we can get embeddable code we can easily insert in our blog templates.
A great club (in this case, a community) is built upon its members' dedication...
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Permalink Reply by Angelo Hulshout on -
Mark,
A valid question on a difficult topic. I've seen a similar site been set up after the Model Driven Experience on Google Groups and it died after about four months. It started in June, and the last of 38(!) posts in total was a conference announcement by the owner that dates from November and hasn't received any replies.
With a site like this one, we may have a better opportunity, if we spread the word about it's existence, and make sure there is something on offer besides a forum and a calendar. As a reference I take a progressive rock site (http://www.progarchives.com) in which I've been involved for about 2 years now. There is a very active forum there, but most of the members and visitors come there for information about bands, albums and mainly album reviews written by other members.
Now, progressive rock is a small pixel on the wide screen of modern music, and in our case MDSD is only a somewhat larger pixel on a somewhat smaller screen. It's there, it's important, but only a limited number of people are really interested.
The big question is: what can we offer? We don't have albums to review, but we may be able to find parallels. Sharing real experiences and putting successes and failures up for debate could be an alternative, but we will likely run into confidentiality issues with our companies and customers there. Offering online access to best practises might be an alternative, but there also we'd need to find a way to keep it alive, to prevent it from dying in a few months time.
Another example that comes to mind and that may bring ideas is the MyGenerationSoftware.com web site. It was build around a freeware code generator for which people could contribute their own generator templates. The forums and the Template library with contributions were very active there for a few, until the original developer decided to move on to something else and founded EntitySpaces.com.
A library of example languages and generators to which people can contribute would be parallel, but I have no clue whether it will be sufficient to keep this network alive.
Third of course is organising online and real life events like your own CGN conference from within the network. That is one of the things that an organisation like IASA does to stay alive and growing. In smaller groups, regular meetings could also work, although my experiences with formal 'local chapters' of larger networks aren't that good - I'd rather stay away from that, it works in e.g. the US, I never saw it succeed in The Netherlands. In contrast, going back to ProgArchives, we sometimes have informal meetings between members and collaborators, when people visit each other's country or area for holidays or business trips.
Ideas like this I have plenty, but what usually lacks in similar communities is time and resources.
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Permalink Reply by Neil Loughran on -
nothing to say really except to say progarchives is an awesome site.. ;-)
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Permalink Reply by Angelo Hulshout on
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Now that is probably the most useful answer given the topic of discussion here ;-) Thanks nonetheless!
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Permalink Reply by Ed Merks on
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There needs to be a reason to come here. Interesting discussions. Useful information. I suggest you prejudice the discussion. :-P Nothing like controversy to make things interesting...
We could debate topics like should users ever hand modify generated code or is that evil? Or fun topics like which is more important: concrete syntax or abstract syntax?
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Permalink Reply by Marcus Munzert on -
What would be the criteria for this social network to be successful?
I think the answer to this question is strongly related to the question "What is the purpose of this network?". If we have a common and clear understanding of the purpose, then we can take the right actions to make the network become successful. In relation to this: one of the first things people most probably will read when they visit this site is About this network. Reading that entry made me joining the network. Making that entry over may make for an even better impression.
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