I'm a new Nim user. I first started playing with it less than three months ago. I created a forum account just now.
Perhaps we need to step back and ask ourselves a philosophical questions. What is the purpose of a programming language community? Once answered a strategy can be formulated and tactics deployed. You might say a community is multi-purposed. That it is for asking and answering, showcasing projects, working together, and so on. This is too broad and too detailed a conception. These are activities a community facilitates, but they are not its purpose. I would simplify the above activities, and more, down to one simple purpose statement. "The Nim community exists to help us get to know each other so we feel confident interacting." Once people are interacting confidently the rest is mostly automatic. The greatest impediment to confident interaction is a trepidation born of uncertainty. And while the newly arrived are particularly susceptible to this, we all experience it in some measure. For myself, I don't know anyone here, and I don't know how you'll respond to this post. This uncertainty might easily have stopped me from engaging. This is an example of an outsider to community member conversion funnel drop-off point. So the first question becomes how can we reduce uncertainty and trepidation across stages of engagement and increase confident interaction? How do people know where to go, when to ask, what to share, etc? How do we make the confidence hurdle lower? These were thoughts I've been mulling over for a while. I hope they are helpful.
