Welcome to the mailing list for the Scheme.org domain name. First, some fundamentals. The registrant on file for Scheme.org is Magnus Ahltorp from Sweden. The administrative and technical contact is Arthur Gleckler (known to Schemers as the current SRFI editor). The previous admin and tech contact was Shriram Krishnamurthi (known for running Schemers.org among many other contributions). Shriram was happy to hand over Scheme.org to people who have time to develop to it, and would like to phase out Schemers.org in favor of Scheme.org once the latter has been properly established. Magnus is also happy to be hands-off but would like to retain ownership of the domain to ensure that it stays non-commercial and does not track the behavior of visitors. Magnus has kindly pre-paid the domain until 2029. The domain registrar and DNS provider is Gandi.net. On to the plans: The essay below is an attempt to lay out a particular vision for Scheme.org. It has been hashed out by me and Arthur with input from a handful of other Schemers. It advocates for an unusual approach because Scheme is governed differently from most programming languages. It is long and detailed; please bear with it, think about it for a while, and tell us what you think on this list so we can get a conversation started. Going forward, we want the administration of Scheme.org to happen entirely in public so that everyone is clear on where things stand with this important domain. The title of this essay is chosen to make a particular point. As programmers, we are used to fast-moving projects, changing plans and informal customs. Getting software written at all is so hard that we have little patience for elaborate social protocol. We believe Scheme.org should be viewed as a fundamentally different kind of project: a conservative one that prioritizes preservation and planning even when that makes new development more difficult. Scheme is not a new language. It comes with almost half a century of history. It has a well established reputation, now guarded by us. Scheme's continuity rests on a loosely organized network of volunteers who come and go. While this is wonderful, the risk of key people going out of reach is ever with us. We must take care not to jeopardize the continued availability, maintenance and development of our resources. Schemers are known to prize independent thought, sometimes to a fault. Our most notable disagreement was the R6RS vs R7RS split. We should take care to preserve neutral ground at the center of Scheme so that adherents of different sub-communities can continue to work together on shared interests even during times when there is widespread disagreement over the future direction of Scheme. Likewise, we should take care that no particular sub-community can alter the public image of Scheme to the detriment of others. Finally, we should protect the Scheme community from being co-opted by commercial, academic or political interests for their own purposes. All of the above concerns are fundamentally tied to the name itself: Scheme. Whoever owns the name holds significant power over the public image of the language and the ability of people to organize around it. That is fine for languages headed by a definite person or group, but Scheme has no owner. The closest thing we have is the Scheme Steering Committee. They ratify the RnRS reports but are far too busy to tend to the day-to-day matters of the language and its community. Running the language community thus falls on its most avid users. That is us. As the internet domain most obviously linked to Scheme's name, Scheme.org is the one entity best placed to represent Scheme in the world. With Scheme.org now in friendly hands, we should take this opportunity to gather around it, make it the best we can, and do our best to ensure it carries on to the next generation of Schemers. Why think about the next 20 years? A lot can happen in a couple of decades, and it's not guaranteed that any of us will still be involved with Scheme after so much time. Setting our sights that far into the future forces us to design a social and technical structure to outlast ourselves. We can start with a template and gradually refine it. If we do this right, the rate of change will slow down over time and the community will increasingly trust in the stability of the structure. Since humans are bad at predicting the future, the most likely success formula is extreme simplicity in the core processes: - We cannot have any rules that are hard to interpret since we may not be around in the future to give advice about them. Rules, procedures and responsibilities need to be simple and straightforward. - We have to codify all knowledge in either code or written documents. We can't rely on word-of-mouth and knowing people who know things. - We have to take maintainer fatigue into account. Scheme.org needs to have an administrator at all times, and it's a lot easier to get someone to commit to a job when it's easy and doesn't take much time. We can't have routine procedures that take a lot of effort. Likewise, training a new administrator has to be quick and easy. - Scheme.org is predicated on the idea that Scheme, the DNS (Domain Name System) and the WWW will still be around 20 years from now. However, it's difficult to say what other tools will be popular. We should favor simple, well-known and platform-neutral tools without elaborate dependencies. Moving further away from the core of Scheme.org, the stakes are lower and we can be more relaxed. But as with the Scheme language itself, we should put a great deal of thought and care into a core that will stand the test of time. On the technology front, we believe one trick in particular holds the key to success: subdomains. The internet is naturally divided by DNS delegation. This exactly mirrors a desirable governing structure for Scheme.org: The root Scheme.org and its web front page should be simple, conservative, and closely guarded -- like a constitution. Less critical subdomains can afford to be more free-wheeling and experimental about both their technical and social aspects. Subdomains are simple to add and cost no extra money. They are a convenient unit of division to work with in various networking, security, and sysadmin contexts. We can freely make lots of them: * r5rs.scheme.org * r6rs.scheme.org * r7rs.scheme.org * srfi.scheme.org (should move late -- will be a big ordeal) * docs.scheme.org * pkgs.scheme.org * lists.scheme.org * files.scheme.org * registry.scheme.org * fantastic.scheme.org (your adventurous Scheme implementation here) * ... It's important to note that we could have as many as 50 subdomains and the site would still be navigable. The front page can group them into categories, with a short explanation next to each subdomain. There would naturally be two kinds of subdomains: * Those owned by a particular group based around a given standard, implementation, or tool. Each subdomain of this kind should be controlled by the group in question. * Those that are community-owned resources about a particular topic, similar to the new Scheme Topics mailing lists at srfi.schemers.org and our many GitHub organizations. They should operate by consensus, with decision making on a public forum such as a mailing list, and with the top level Scheme.org administrators acting as last-resort tie breakers for any disputes. Each subdomain should be responsible for setting up and maintaining its own servers. The top level Scheme.org administration should only be tasked with updating DNS records as requested, and with maintenance of the Scheme.org front page. Delegating all other responsibilities to subdomain admins will naturally ensure the fault tolerance of Scheme.org as a whole and enable a light workload for the people committed to be the top level administrators. One important angle missing from the above treatment is the legal one. No amount of goodwill or technical savvy can help us if we are no longer the registered owner of Scheme.org. Scheme is a common English word, and Scheme.org could be sold for upwards of 10k USD if someone was either greedy or desperate for money. It could also be taken over by an organization incompatible with our goals. To that end, a few of us have pondered whether it might be a good idea to set up a formal non-profit association to act as the legal owner of Scheme.org and any other important internet properties related to Scheme that people wish to donate to it. We may not have anyone in the Scheme community who is excited about the paperwork involved, but the stakes are high enough that if the cost is not prohibitive this step is worth taking anyway. Ideally Scheme.org would become so reliable that Scheme implementors could feel as comfortable hosting their implementation's primary website at fantastic.scheme.org as they would at their own separate domain fantastic-scheme.org. There would be nothing like gathering implementations under the umbrella of Scheme.org to signal the cohesion and organization of the Scheme community to outsiders -- a level of cohesion that is probably unmatched by any other significant language. But authors hold their implementations dear, and major ones will not take such a drastic step without a deep trust in the social and legal basis of Scheme.org. If we work hard at building that trust for a number of years, this may eventually be our ultimate prize. But even without such an accomplishment, every extra resource we add under Scheme.org builds the reputation of Scheme as a collaborative community and provides direct benefit to users who can thus more easily find their way around Scheme. If you're interested in helping us bring Scheme.org and its subdomains to life, please join this discussion. We're looking for volunteers to create and maintain Scheme.org and interesting and useful subdomains, and to help us figure out the process for organizing this effort for the long haul.
