Walter and Andrei and community relationship management

[Jonathan M Davis via Digitalmars-d]

On Monday, April 10, 2017 15:07:11 Walter Bright via Digitalmars-d wrote:
> On 4/10/2017 3:58 AM, Nick B wrote:
> >> Somebody has to work on it to move it forward - who do you propose
> >> should do it? We don't have a team anywhere whose job it is to create
> >> detailed proposals based on other peoples' ideas (which appear in the
> >> forum every day). Things rarely move forward unless a champion for it
> >> self-selects with the will and motivation to push it relentlessly.
> >
> > That sets a high bar. Can you give an example when this has worked well,
> > or have they been mostly minor changes?
>
> There are many. A random sampling:
>
> Daniel Murphy - moving front end to D
> Jacob Carlborg - Objective C support
> Stephan Koch - newCTFE
> Brad Roberts - autotester, bugzilla
> the gdc and ldc teams
> Rainer Schutze - GC work, Visual Studio support
> Martin Nowak - the releases
> Ali Cehreli - book on D
> Adam Ruppe - book on D
> Jan Knepper - the dlang site server
>
> And a LOT more.
>
> None of them are doing what I told them to do. I didn't pick any of them.
> They are all self-selected champions. They are what moves D forward.
>
> Pragmatically speaking, the champions are the ones with the most say,
> because they do the work.
>
> (Even doing the work doesn't guarantee acceptance, but it improves the
> odds greatly over just posting ideas.)

LOL. IIRC, there have been cases where you and/or Andrei have actually tried
to get folks to do specific stuff, and it generally hasn't worked. Pretty
much everything that gets done around here is because someone steps and does
it.

Regardless, because we're all doing this in our free time, what everyone
does is going to be highly influenced by what they're interested in or what
they need. This does unfortunately tend to result in a number of things not
getting done that really should get done (in addition to the issues with
everyone finding enough time to do what they're trying to do or whether
there are enough people to do what needs doing), but we've gotten a lot of
good stuff done around here, because someone decided to step up and champion
something, and for better or worse, if no one steps up to champion
something, odds are, it doesn't get done.

- Jonathan M Davis