Who is involved? Updates and additions

[masinter]

context; "the call" was a call with educopia (sponsors of the Software Preservation network) and what kind of consulting they could offer.

@rmkaplan via email:

Coming off of our call, I looked at the Interlisp web page. I see that you have
a link to your page. If there are links (e.g. linked in) for some of the other
people, should we put them in? Might make us look more serious.

For me, maybe the wikipedia page.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ronald_Kaplan
@masinter
I can add your link, but I was thinking of replacing the whole section with the gloss from the annual report
Section (toward the end): Who are we?
and the "We" comes from participating in mail, github, or community activities.

The problem with a list of people is that it doesn't sustain. -- I put in the list that's there a year ago. As John Cowan said one meeting -- people who want to know can look, and decide themselves.
And open source projects (like XQuartz!, whose financials are managed by SPI) what do they do?

[rmkaplan]

You could keep a list of current contributors and a separate list of past contributors, as people drop off. It’s just an idea about adding a sense of the breadth and scope of our community.

…

On Mar 8, 2022, at 1:25 PM, Larry Masinter ***@***.***> wrote: context; "the call" was a call with educopia (sponsors of the Software Preservation network) and what kind of consulting they could offer. @rmkaplan <https://github.com/rmkaplan> via email: Coming off of our call, I looked at the Interlisp web page. I see that you have a link to your page. If there are links (e.g. linked in) for some of the other people, should we put them in? Might make us look more serious. For me, maybe the wikipedia page. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ronald_Kaplan <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ronald_Kaplan> @masinter <https://github.com/masinter> I can add your link, but I was thinking of replacing the whole section with the gloss from the annual report <https://docs.google.com/document/d/1cGBDNMO5yt6ymi7YiCcf6uNn6RBe5PVS7mW4kFnlzNY/edit#heading=h.kly6krobw8zi> Section (toward the end): Who are we? and the "We" comes from participating in mail, github, or community activities. The problem with a list of people is that it doesn't sustain. -- I put in the list that's there a year ago. As John Cowan said one meeting -- people who want to know can look, and decide themselves. And open source projects (like XQuartz!, whose financials are managed by SPI) what do they do? — Reply to this email directly, view it on GitHub <https://github.com/Interlisp/Interlisp.github.io/issues/13>, or unsubscribe <https://github.com/notifications/unsubscribe-auth/AQSTUJN66BHOPA5TU6W5LV3U67AVTANCNFSM5QHRMXRA>. You are receiving this because you were mentioned.

[masinter]

I'm always hopeful that people who drop off are just temporarily gone. There isn't a process for "dropping off". I would like to get better at "community building" as a group.

If you go to the web site repo the setup is what I did for my home site https://LarryMasinter.net with some help from Fiverr.
Most of the site is one web page ("index.html") except for documents (in "docs") and the bibliography.

In index.html, you wrap <a href="https://en.wikipedia.com/Ron_Kaplan">Ron Kaplan</a> around your name.

The repo is set up with an automatic Action by github pages to update the server https://Interlisp.Org whenever there is a push to master.
It takes a minute or two for the update to happen.

If you want to see what it will look like before doing a commit and push
point your browser at

file:///C:/Users/Kaplan/Interlisp.github.io/index.html

or wherever you cloned it. I think it is set up so that members of the Interlisp group can push to master without prior review and approval, but maybe people would be more comfortable with guardrails (requiring PR).

I'm not sure how much of this is shared by online.

[stumbo]

While I agree maintaining a list of names is difficult, I sort of like the idea of it being there. I think its good to directly acknowledge those that have contributed - both past and present.

Maybe a good approach is to start with the material from the annual report - How to Contribute and follow that with a list of Contributors. Or pull the How to Contribute into a standalone page.

@skaisler1 and I had started talking about updating the front page in January. I finally had some time yesterday and started working on that. I'm looking at tools that help you easily construct and update static html pages. There are several that appear to be supported by GitHub pages and would allow us to more easily update content.

This might make updating Contributors (and News) much more palatable.

[orcmid]

I don't quite understand the thrust. One can use the GitHub-provided Wiki to hold something like that or use a GitHub Pages page (e.g., https://interlisp.github.io/medley/contributors) that is authored in markdown and automatically published when updated somewhere like medley/docs/contributors/index.md.

There always needs to be curation so the rolling-off or categorizing past versus current contributors needs to be addressed, just like people will also deal with links to materials about themselves, name changes, etc.

Maybe part of the process is to have some sort of maintained heartbeat. That might be overthinking at this stage. If GitHub IDs are recorded (why not?) there are ways to know about inactivity or even closing of such an account and I suppose there could be some data scraping. I suggest it might be useful to anticipate that but not take any action at this stage. No need for added maintenance requirements.

[PS: I recognize that the project does not appear to publish medley/docs as Github pages. In fact, that would still be a good place to put those PDFs, since it would automatically put them at the interlisp.github.io/medley folder. You could generate them from somewhere else of course and you could organize them differently into subfolders as desired. GitHub pages just copies things like .txt, .pdf, and .html to the web location, it notices new/changed material, and it preserves subfolder structure. You'd need an index or equivalent for folks to find them and navigate to them, downloading/opening or not. Sorry if I am reporting what is already known about this. The problem of contributor attribution and tenure is somewhat separate.]

[orcmid]

@stumbo I'm looking at tools that help you easily construct and update static html pages. There are several that appear to be supported by GitHub pages and would allow us to more easily update content.

I'm curious what you saw that is appealing. I have not had good fortune in this case (and I miss the simplicity of Microsoft FrontPage).

I've encountered a variety of frameworks that run locally on something like node.js and will publish to a local folder (which could be a clone of course), and many do that into a Github project/docs/ folder (clone) so that the hosting and provisioning of the web site is handled by Github after committing to the origin folder (e.g., project/docs). Although static HTML for the server, not very static for the client. This does not provide well for collaborative editing at the framework level, and one is still writing YAML and Markdown in some fashion. And of course change-tracking is not of the as-authored material although I always had my framework setup in a separate GitHub repo.

I gave up on all this when I saw that the one-more-level of abstraction was just more work and a pretty leaky abstraction at that; node.js dependency hell also kicked in.

[masinter]

There's also the GitHub profile, which you can update.
https://docs.github.com/en/account-and-profile
For "who we are" it seems to correlate well with participation to use that.
From the profile you can link to whatever.

[masinter]

I think we've made quite a bit of progress on this Issue. The website has a page --
Getting Involved about how newcomers can get involved, which also serves as a categorization of who else can contribute.

Maybe we should point to the Issues that are marked "Help Wanted" ?

The Wiki had a "Guest Book". Do one as a Google Form? Revive the wiki for features that aren't part of the new web site?

We need some better text about the OG's of the project (Ron, Me, Nick, Frank, Herb?)

Everyone on LispCore should have a brief introduction

[masinter]

I think we've made quite a bit of progress on the original issue. The website has a page --
Getting Involved about how newcomers can get involved, which also serves as a categorization of who else can contribute.

Maybe we should point to the Issues that are marked "Help Wanted" ?

The Wiki had a "Guest Book". Do one as a Google Form? Revive the wiki for features that aren't part of the new web site?

We need some better text about the OG's of the project (Ron, Me, Nick, Frank, Herb?)

Everyone on LispCore should have a brief introduction. Do we prefer GitHub profiles?

[pamoroso]

Issue #1056 has a possible initial list of "Help Wanted" issues.

I seemed to understand the Wiki was discontinued: is it still used?

As for introductions, GitHub profiles are good starting points as they are easy to customize and update.

[masinter]

We moved 95% of the wiki content to the (hugo-baased) website (and much of the material on the old website). but we haven't deleted them, there's just a notice at top that the content is "in transition".
Cleaning this up is a "help wanted" task but hard to delegate completely; what things to keep and what to throw away. For example, are there any old pointers to content we've obsoleted. Without trapping 404's it's hard to know what indirect we should serve.

[masinter]

For the BALISP presentation I did add a slide that listed people's names, but (a) I left out some contributors (not on purpose) and I wound up sorting by length of name.
I was thinking of moving the "goals" document into the GitHub Discussion as a parallel to the screenshot pages, to cover individuals, their background, interest in Lisp etc.

Now added to "website" project

[stumbo]

Closing this issue. Recognizing that there is more work to do in compiling the names of individuals associated with Interlisp and Medley I have opened issue #1241 as a place to continue to work that aspect of this issue.

[masinter]

I think the credits page really still needs work, and the comments haven't been addressed.
Some important contributors are missing. The contributors list needs a better categorization
"People contributing to the 2020's Medley Interlisp Project" vs "People who helped build Interlisp and Medley" which we are not listing currently, but including those whose listings are in memoriam.

Probably this should incude a discussion of "initials" in functions and who did what, the :EDIT-BY addition, FILECREATED etc, the use of version control at Envos and the PARC->CHM donation sources.

Anyway I am reopening this issue....

[masinter]

@pmcjones suggested taking a look at https://multicians.org/multicians.html
as a solution another volunteer project took.