Growing Pains

[mirod]

First let me explain why I care about Perl Monks:

I love the Monastery. I would go as far as to say I _need_ it. See, I used to live in Boston, where Perl geeks are a dime a dozen. There is a real Perl community there and it is easy and fun to be part of it. Now that I moved back to Southern France things are quite different.

Here a job is a job, and loving it is severely frowned upon. I know of no other Perl programmer, let alone Perl geek, around here. People just don't understand how you can get emotionnaly involved in a programming language. Imagine an entire country of Java programmers ;--) So except for the odd trip back to the US, PerlMonks is my only chance to stay in touch with the Perl community and to feel like I am not too weird, or at least that there are people out there that are even weirder than I am ;--) And that's not even mentionning that it's about the only (and undoubtlessly the friendliest) way for me to keep learning about Perl. In short the Monastery reminds me every day that this is not just a job.

So here is my take on a couple of recent threads:

I have been part of a couple of "online communities" in my days and I guess what we are experiencing right now is part of the inevitable dynamics of such a community. Hell, it's part of the dynamics of every community, be it virtual or not, it is just more of a problem when there are no real meetings between members.

Tensions appear when various members become very involved in the community but happen to have differing expectations about it and (as humans tend to do) fail to recognize that their mental picture of the place might not be shared by all. Then those conflicting visions of the role and modus operandi of the site clash, more often than not resulting in some (or all) of the involved parties leaving the community.

I must say that Perl Monks, maybe because Perl itself promotes TMTOWTDI, has been remarkably tension-free so far and even the handling of the "Chatterbox Incident" is pretty mature so far, so I am not to worried, I just want monks to realize that this site is important in more ways than one, and that it would be a pity to let things get worse.

So I hope the site retains it's atmosphere, that we do not loose members over legal scares, XP mongering or other trivialities, and remember that if in some parts of the World it is just one more Perl resource in some Larry-forsaken realms it is more like a real Monastery, the place to renew the Faith and to feel at home.

[quidity]

Although I'm not really a fan of discussions about discussion sites, I do have a theory about this:

In the past, communities have only grown slowly, a couple of people would join the community in any year, and a few would leave. In the new buzzword laden world that we live in a community gets a new place to form, in a virtual space.

This means that it can grow _1_ from nothing to something frighteningly large in a matter of months until it reaches the point where the signal to noise ratio becomes so bad that people who used to read most of the content get bored and wonder off.

This hasn't happened with perlmonks yet, but it certainly has affected slashdot and newsgroups like comp.lang.perl.misc . To hold off the decay that comes with increased popularity, it might become necessary to rapidly alter the voting system, make people with higher levels more able to post (while still letting new people in) or add new categories which allow people to discuss topics in greater detail but with a narrower scope.

_1_ see Newest Nodes for the extra users.

Update: In my travels around the web I found the following from a few years ago which might interest people. Life Cycle of a BBS