So… retired/unemployed programmers or employed ones who’d like to contribute to open source:

What do you think of a “Civilian Documentation Corps”¹?

There are tons of contributed packages to popular languages that are fine but underused because underdocumented. Some of the package owners are well-intentioned but no good at documentation or don’t understand its importance. Why not swoop in with an offer of help? (1/6)

Why a “corps”? Why not just have individual programmers do it? After all, that’s what I am doing with the Elixir Lens package² and, before it, the PureScript lens package³.

Because individual people doing Thing X are just weirdos. A group of people dedicated to doing Thing X raises its profile, makes it seem a thing worth doing. (2/6)

Also, an organization can encourage people doing the Right Things to keep doing them. When I was chair of the Agile Alliance, I created the Gordon Pask Award⁴ to give small cash grants + recognition to people who were advancing the state of the practice, hoping they would have a higher profile from which to replace Boring Old Farts like me. That didn’t work out so great, but I still think things like MacArthur Genius Grants⁵ can be useful. (3/6)

As my Faithful Readers know, post retirement I’ve been trying to give money away to help graduate students and such improve the field that’s done so much for me, without success. Consider this potentially another try.

—————————— (4/6)

¹ I picked the name because the Civilian Conservation Corps was a Great Depression-era program to give unemployed people jobs doing useful work that had gone undone because there was no immediate prospect of profit. They did some *excellent* work, some of which is still used today, nearly 100 years later. The “scratch the unscratched itch” attitude fits well with open source. (5/6)

² https://github.com/marick/lens2. Very much still a work in progress, but I’m putting a lot of work into something too many people find mysterious because (I think) it hasn’t been explained accessibly. https://github.com/marick/lens2/blob/main/mostly_words/tutorial01.md

³ https://leanpub.com/lenses

⁴ https://www.infoq.com/news/2007/08/2007-pask-awards/

⁵ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MacArthur_Fellows_Program (6/6)