In reply to @zimbatm:numtide.com
Figuring marketing out is super difficult, that's why I was thinking it could be helpful to have an expert come in and help with these types of reasoning.

In reply to @fricklerhandwerk:matrix.org
Although more importantly we need expert reasoning on what type of projects to even promote. The how is kind of secondary at the moment. This is essentially what the UX workshop in one month about.

In reply to @zimbatm:numtide.com
I have been thinking about how to provide better feedback over lunch.

One input that I received many times by newcomers is that they are overwhelmed with the amount of projects that they see in the community. It's hard for them to know which one to pick, and how they would fit in their toolbelt.

That's why when I see projects being promoted by the official NixOS account, it makes me wonder what effect is has on those people. Because it comes from the official account, these projects might be perceived as being endorsed/vetted.

Does that make sense?

I received different feedback. Mostly that they found new interested projects that are happening around nix community. I guess this is the bias we have when receiving feedback, we only listen what we like :)

I think spreading the word of what is happening in nix community is good. Likewise what you said, knowing what is official and what not (which is a general problem in our community eg. is hydra/nixops/... an official project?

Is posting on a discourse forum also mudding this area what is official and what not. We can easily add something to the posts in a form: "Look at what nix community is building ..."

In reply to @garbas:matrix.org
I don't think in person presence is needed for this kind of discussions. In person just makes those who can not come excluded from it.

From all I gathered in the in-person or synchronous meetings of the past two years, especially with people I thought I was in some more profound disagreement, it always turned out we all kind of want the same thing. But for various reasons we often fail to align either on somewhat superficial aspects or on priorities and order of execution. Which hints at that our mental models of the problem structure and its internal dependency relations may be out of sync.

But once that’s settled, the next steps are often obvious and uncontroversial. As long as the people involved manage to write down that thought process clearly enough, most of the time there is nothing to add to that. It does happen that small groups of people overlook important parts, and that’s why there needs to be a healthy interval between these discussions and final decisions, but otherwise it seems to work quite well that way.