On the panel discussion at Dconf day 3

[Mike Parker]

On Monday, 4 September 2023 at 08:40:13 UTC, A.Guy wrote:
> During the last day's panel discussion at the Dconf, the 
> presence of the Ucora marketing representative was truly in 
> poor taste. Not to mention the fact that he was given so much 
> speaking time amid various technical questions. Upon reviewing 
> the video on YouTube, it feels like we're watching interspersed 
> advertisements.
>
> If IVY were indeed something serious, perhaps it wouldn't need 
> all this publicity, and instead of having the Ucora 
> representative speak, we could have received substantial 
> details from Walter or Atila (not just the "it made me realize 
> I should listen to the contributors and not mind my own 
> business..." comment). It seems like there's a lot of fluff and 
> excessive promotion of their IVY program, all of this happening 
> in the midst of the only Dlang event that has some level of 
> presence and media attention. As a spectator, I simply felt 
> embarrassed.

For quite a while, we'd received many complaints about lack of 
vision/direction/management. When we finished the IVY program, I 
made an announcement to let everyone know we're trying to do 
something about that. IVY just happens to be the tool we're using 
to make it happen.

Some of the responses to that were much like yours, calling it a 
cult, propaganda, etc. I tried to say a bit more about it in 
another post, and then discussed it in one of our BeerConf 
sessions, but I could only scratch the surface. I received 
several DMs and emails about it.

We invited Saeed as our guest speaker and added him to our panel 
so that we could better inform the community what IVY actually is 
and give them the opportunity to ask questions of the source. The 
purpose was infornational, not commercial. The workshop allowed 
those interested in learning more to get a closer look. Several 
people took advantage.

We are employing IVY to better organize and establish a path for 
pushing D, the ecosystem, and our community forward. You really 
don't have to care about it at all. If you want to think it's a 
cult, that's your prerogative. I can tell you until the cows come 
home that it is not a cult and that we aren't just marketing it 
for Ucora, and you might never  believe me. That's perfectly 
fine. Go about using D and participating in the community in any 
way you like and forget that IVY exists.

One of the things IVY is doing for us is helping us to learn how 
to identify why our contributors want to contribute and what form 
of contribution would best suit them. That will help us better 
determine which tasks in our ecosystem any given contributor will 
be the most motivated and passionate about completing. If any 
given contributor wants to actively participate in IVY, then 
their IVY statement will make the process of assigning tasks even 
easier. Motivated and passionate contributors will hopefully be 
happier about their contributions and should see more positive 
outcomes---a win-win for all of us.

Ucora's motivation comes in wanting to see the D Language 
Foundation succeed. They have built their business on D and it is 
very much in their long-term interest for the D language, 
ecosystem, and community to thrive. They might make money off of 
IVY as a consequence, but it's the survivability of D that led 
them to invite us to their program pro bono. Their interests are 
aligned with ours. I see that as a win for all of us.

I'm always happy to talk to anyone about what IVY is and how 
we're using it, but we aren't going to force it on anyone. We 
just want to solve the problems our users are having, build out 
the ecosystem to be more useful and cover more ground, and 
generally make our favorite programming language even better.