Community of MCL Practice: combining MCL and Mosaic

[ralex@cs.colorado.edu (Alex)]

We are interested in communities of practice. The MCL user community
seems to be an interesting success story. The great support of the MCL
team, the cambridge.apple.com file repository, and the
comp.lang.lisp.mcl newgroup are important mechanisms to get the
community going. Personally, I have contributed a number of things
including the "symbol-completion" and "speech-manager". As the
community is gaining new momentum - trough the promise of the PowerPC
version of MCL- I wonder if people have any insight why this community
is working? What is good about it, what is bad about, how could it be
improved?

A community of practice works a bit like an economy. Important factors
for people to contribute are COST and BENEFIT. An important benefit
from posting stuff is to get feedback (if you leave your email address
in the source). The thing here is that as an author of code one get
only very little feedback and typically the feedback is about problems.


I wonder if people have any ideas how the community could be improved?
For instance, what kind of interesting things could we do with Mosaic
that are hard or even impossible to do with the current FTP approach to
create a community repository? We have started to create a thing called
the Remote Exploratorium that essentially is an MCL application hooked
up to Mosaic. Through its incremental compilation MCL is ideally suited
as WWW front and back end. Anybody doing stuff with MCL and Mosaic?

  Any ideas, or pointers?
  
 Cheers, Alex


     _/_/_/    _/_/_/  _/_/_/    Alexander Repenning
(ralex@cs.colorado.edu)
   _/      _/    _/      _/      University of Colorado
  _/            _/      _/       Department of Computer Science and
 _/            _/      _/        Institute of Cognitive Science
_/      _/    _/      _/         Boulder, CO 80309-0430
 _/_/_/        _/_/_/            Phone: (303) 492-1349, Fax: (303)
492-2844 
http://www.cs.colorado.edu/homes/ralex/public_html/Home.html