A New Era for the D Community

[Mike Parker]

At DConf '22, Roberto Ierusalimschy, the lead designer of [the 
Lua programming language](https://www.lua.org/), was [our guest 
keynote speaker](https://youtu.be/H3inzGGFefg). At the end of his 
talk, Robert Schadek [asked him how he organized the Lua 
community](https://youtu.be/H3inzGGFefg?t=3223). His answer: Is 
it too ugly if I say I don't?

In [my talk at the same 
conference](https://youtu.be/gk_QjjxCGSY), I highlighted part of 
the history of the D community's evolution. I used the metaphor 
of a pioneer settlement that evolved into a village and then into 
a town. In those early pioneering days, Walter's approach to 
organizing the community was the same as Roberto's. He didn't 
need to do anything. The community organized itself and built 
from scratch the foundations of the ecosystem we have today. If 
you discovered D and expected only to be a user and never a 
contributor, then D just wasn't for you. Of course, as the 
community grew and evolved, and built up more of the ecosystem, 
there was increasing space for noncontributors. That, in turn, 
led to shifting expectations.

At different points in D's history, Walter, Andrei, and motivated 
community members took steps to adapt to changing expectations. 
For several years they were able to keep up reasonably well. To 
give just one example, in the earliest days, users posted bug 
reports in the forums or by emailing Walter, and contributors 
emailed him patches. In response to calls for better bug 
management, a community member volunteered to maintain a Bugzilla 
instance. Then later, when people were wondering why they had to 
submit patches to Bugzilla when GitHub existed, Walter was 
persuaded to put the compiler's source on GitHub.

By the time Walter and Andrei established the D Language 
Foundation in 2015, they had settled into a very loose management 
style. Motivated community members volunteered to create 
services, or take charge of something in the ecosystem, and 
Walter and Andrei would give their blessing. I can't speak to 
what their goals were with the Foundation, but they largely 
continued that approach to managing the ecosystem. Unfortunately, 
as the community continued to grow and expectations continued to 
evolve, that approach was unsustainable.

Ten years ago, if the forums went down, everyone knew to contact 
Vladimir Panteleev. Today, many people don't know, and probably 
don't care, that he pays for and maintains the server on which 
the forums are hosted. The forums are on dlang.org, the official 
website of the D Language Foundation, so the DLF is responsible 
for getting things back up. When a bug report remains open for 
years, it doesn't matter that it's because it hasn't come to the 
attention of someone with the time, ability, and motivation to 
fix it. The DLF is responsible for organizing resources to 
address reported issues, and if we can't, that's on us.

One of the biggest complaints I've heard over the past few years 
is some form of "lack of leadership/management/vision". It's 
painful to hear, as I know that everyone involved with the DLF is 
personally invested. We're here because we love what we're doing. 
Yet, the criticism is on the mark.

Yes, there have been improvements over the past few years. The 
quarterly DLF meetings with industry representatives, initially 
proposed by Nicholas Wilson, have been productive. The monthly 
meetings that grew out of those have led to several positive 
changes. Symmetry's sponsorship of the Pull Request and Issue 
Manager positions held by Razvan Nitu and Dennis Korpel has been 
a huge boon. We've begun migrating some ecosystem services to DLF 
servers (it's going very slowly, but it's happening). We've done 
several good things that I could enumerate here. But 
collectively, it's the equivalent of being surrounded by small 
fires and running around to put them out at random. We simply do 
not have a structured system of management.

Several times over the past couple of years, we discussed what to 
do about it. We read books, watched presentations, and asked for 
advice. We got nowhere.

Then, in July of last year, Paul Toth of Ucora reached out with 
an offer. Had I known at the time that it was going to change 
everything, I would have put it at the top of my priority list. 
Alas, it wasn't until November that things started moving.

Ucora’s long-term vision is [to change the way the world 
works](https://ucora.com/). As part of their mission, they 
provide organizations with the tools they need to transform the 
way they work. [IVY, their organizational development 
program](https://ucora.com/solutions/organizational-development/), is a simple but innovative approach to workflow. Ucora has been using D for several years. They're invested in D's success, and so they want the DLF to be successful. Paul offered to put the DLF team through the IVY program at no charge. We accepted, and every Friday for the past 14 weeks we've been having sessions with Saeed Sabeti, Ucora's Director of Organizational Development. May 5th will be our 15th and final session.

This has been a transformative experience. In part, it's been a 
journey of self-discovery. In discovering ourselves, we've 
learned more about each other. We now have a deeper insight into 
what motivates and demotivates each of us, why we're devoting a 
chunk of our lives to D, and how that knowledge can help us in 
our work. Importantly, we've also discovered our vision for the 
DLF and learned how to view our work through the IVY Lens.

The result is that we now have the tools we need to build up that 
structured system of management that we've been missing, and a 
much clearer view of how to get there. In the coming months, 
that's precisely what we're going to focus on. We'll be having 
regular meetings outside of our monthlies to make it happen.

You're going to hear more about IVY as time goes by, and 
eventually, we're going to start employing it more broadly in the 
community. We now have a better idea of how to more effectively 
guide contributors so that they can be more efficient and stay 
motivated. Before we get to that point, we've got a lot of 
decisions to make and a lot of work to do internally to provide a 
foundation on which we can build.

I'm not exaggerating when I say that this is going to be the most 
significant change in the D community in the 20 years I've been a 
part of it. I expect we're going to encounter bumps along the 
way, but that's okay. We now have a clear vision and purpose, and 
that makes all the difference.

Those of us who participated in the IVY program are grateful to 
Ucora for presenting us with the opportunity. Not only will IVY 
help us in guiding D, but we can take what we've learned and 
apply it to other areas of our lives. They've given us a valuable 
gift.

And on a personal note, I want to thank all of the DLF associates 
who participated. Going into it, everyone was hopeful something 
good would come of it, but I think most of the group were unsure 
if it would be helpful. None of us knew what to expect. I may 
have been the only one truly excited about it, and still, I was 
concerned I was being overly optimistic. As we continued the 
sessions, it was fun to see when someone finally "got it". In the 
end, we all did.

Our enthusiasm is high, and we're ready to get going. I think 
you'll like where we're headed.