How did this community get to be what it is?

[coen.bakker]

Wondering about a piece of history.

Spending time on Elixir Forum is great. I’ve always gotten support and the community has mostly been very responsive and respectful.

I joined much too late to know how that evolved over time and what drove it. Any ideas?

P.S. No idea how to tag this.

[benwilson512]

@coen.bakker

what drove it

At the very start the basic ethos was: “Jose is nice, so we are also nice”. I’ve been participating in the Elixir community since somewhere around v0.10, and Jose’s cheerful and insightful presence really set the bar early on for how the community would behave toward and engage with one another. Chris McCord is cut from the same cloth in that regard, and we are all very fortunate in that respect.

It’s also difficult to overstate how impactful @AstonJ’s leadership on this forum has been. He has a very clear vision for how he wants the community to operate and the culture he wants to foster. He has put in a ton of effort to make the forum be what it is, and to support the mod team to help keep it that way.

Of course it really wouldn’t be possible without the many other contributions from too many people to call out here. What you want though is for those contributions to all sort of coalesce around a common approach, and that common approach requires leadership of both a technical and cultural variety.

[AstonJ]

Ben has given you a great answer and I would just add that from my perspective it was about helping instil the standards that I felt José (and others) wanted for the community given what I knew about him, Chris and Elixir at the time - it just so happened that I shared many of the same values and that made me realise I could help achieve those goals (while at the same time help prevent many of the pitfalls) given I had some good experience in the space. So I’ve been more like a conduit really, for what people like Ben wanted

Speaking of @benwilson512, here’s what I said about him in our 2022 Update thread:

@AstonJ

You yourself are a prime example of why the forum and the community is so awesome Ben - you have been here since day one and still, even after all these years, you are often one of the first to respond to people’s threads and you rank joint second (with Koko) for having the most accepted solutions I have no doubt that anyone who has googled more than a handful of Elixir related questions will have come across one of your posts over the years. This community is awesome because we have people like you in it <3

Our community is awesome and has got to where it has precisely because of people like Ben in it

In answer to your wider question, we actually touched upon this in our 2023 update:

@elixirforum

Elixir has gone from strength to strength, and you really have been a big part of why it has. If you’re ever in doubt just look at other similarly aged and hyped languages that have fallen by the wayside - a notable difference has been you, your enthusiasm, and the buzz and excitement you’ve helped generate on places like this - something which also helps create that all important self-perpetuating loop. So even if you haven’t created a library or sent a PR, your presence and contributions no matter how small you think they may have been have played an important role. You’ve helped make the community bigger, stronger and more enticing, by creating the sort of buzz, activity and usefulness that make communities like these attractive. It’s why people have been saying things like this:

Positivity is incredibly powerful and has without a doubt been a major factor in the Elixir success story - your words and actions can influence things in more ways than you might imagine

In fact you have reminded me of this amazing talk which I think is quite fitting here:

2015 World Champion: 'The Power of Words' Mohammed Qahtani, Toastmasters International