A few months back, I had read Vyacheslav Matyukhin's announcement of the Play Perl project and I immediately thought that the idea of a social network for programming was a sound one1, but I was not sure if it would just languish and become another site that nobody visits. The recent release and widespread adoption of the site by the Perl community gives me optimism for the kind of cooperation this site can bring to Perl. Play Perl brings a unique way to spring the community into action — which excites me. I would like to note that these ideas are not unique in application to Perl, but could be used for any distributed collaborative effort.

There already exist tools for open-source where we can share tasks and wishlist items: either project specific such as bug trackers or cross-project such as OpenHatch, 24 Pull Requests, and the various project proposals made for GSOC. What does Play Perl add to what's already out there?

Firstly, it frees the projects from belonging to a single person. People already create todo lists with projects that they would like to work on, but these todo lists usually remain private. In an open-source environment, this can make it difficult to find other people that might be interested in helping those ideas get off the ground. With Play Perl, the todo list item (or “quest”) no longer has to stay with the person that came up with it. Anyone can see what may need to be done and if they have enough round tuits, they can work on it. A quote that I recently read on the Wikipedia article for Alexander Kronrod sums up how I see this:

A biographer wrote Kronrod gave ideas "away left and right, quite honestly being convinced that the authorship belongs to the one who implements them."

In this sense, Play Perl is an ideas bank, but it is much more than that. By allowing these ideas to be voted on, it allows you to choose which one to work on first. You can prioritise your time based on what would be most beneficial to the community — a metric that is difficult to ascertain on your own.

Secondly, with the gamification2 of collaboration, the process of implementing ideas becomes part of a feedback loop — we can introduce positive reinforcement for our work through the interaction with the community. This feedback loop process already happens through media such as mailing lists and IRC (karmabots, anyone?). Play Perl quantifies this and lets us see how much our contributions help others.

The last and possibly the most important aspect of Play Perl that leads me to believe in its long-term success is its focus on tasks from a single community. Everyone in the community can quickly see what the others are working on in a way that is hard to do with blogs or GitHub3 due to granularity. Ideas often get lost with time, but more eyes can ensure that they get implemented. I frequently browse the latest CPAN uploads to look for interesting modules and I find myself following the feed on Play Perl the same way. I can justify the time spent browsing through all this activity on both sites because I know that there is likely an item of interest (high probability of reward) and each item is a blip of text that I can quickly scan through (low cost to reading each item). Looking at modules lets me see what code already exists, but Play Perl lets me see what code will probably exist in the future. Providing this new view on the workflow of open-source development is empowering because it provides a channel for the free flow of a specific kind of information that was previously trapped in other less-visible media. Having easy access to this information means we can interact with it directly at a scale that best fits the message.

I look forward to seeing Play Perl flourish in the coming months.

This blog post brought to you by Play Perl. ;-)