[en] The OCaml ecosystem has seen dramatic advances over the last few years, including tooling, compiler improvements and resources for new and old user users alike. However, a community is much more than the sum of its software and there has been a concomitant growth in the number of people becoming interested in OCaml, contributing to tutorials and giving user-group talks.
These kinds of activities are important for the long-term health of the ecosystem yet they are rarely discussed in and of themselves. There are typically associated questions that are discussed as a community grows that involve the practicalities of governance and co-ordination of community-focused projects, which will be discussed.
This talk aims to describe the growth the community has seen over the last few years and will attempt to provide some subjective figures that we might use to chart its growth. Some examples will include the places that new users typically look for discussions, including social media (HackerNews, Reddit, Twitter, etc), specific Q&A sites such as StackOverflow, code sharing sites like GitHub, as well as the traditional mailing lists. It will also consider how other communities have organised themselves, which will help to put OCaml in the context of the wider open source ecosystem. Discussion is invited as to how we continue to build on the successes to date.
Research center :
CREMMI - Modélisation mathématique et informatique
