The CL Gardeners is a group of enthusiasts working to grow Lisp. Some more information is available at the CL Gardeners Website, by subscribing to the mailing list, and by looking at the mailing list archives.

Philosophy

A big point behind the CL Gardeners philosophy is that we can do a lot of good with a lot less effort by just doing things that don't require massive coordination with existing projects. Think gardening not landscape architecture. We just want to be on guard against trying to bite off too much at once. Imagine that we're all working in a huge garden spread all over a country estate. There are a zillion nooks and crannies where a gardener working alone can tend to a few plants and help them grow. Other places there might be an opportunity for a small team to reclaim a bit of overgrown, neglected land and put in some nice rose bushes or something. And it's also useful for people to walk through the garden and takes notes about what's where so we know what needs to be done. What we want to avoid is bringing in the bulldozers and backhoes and ripping everything up with a promise to put it all back together better than before.

Planted: Official projects

• Package and Resource Directory
• Common Lisp FAQ
• Application Builder

Potted: Proposed projects

• Gardeners Reports
• Standard Utilities

Sprouts: Championed Projects

• Slim-Vim
• Portable Threads
• Project FreeSpec

Seedlings & Wildflowers: Unchampioned Projects

• Securing ASDF
• ASDF Universality
• CGI Capable LispBox - (Josh Staiger)
• Code mining and revival
• Fixing ASDF-INSTALLable packages
• Lisp Examples
  Perhaps The Common Lisp Cookbook is the best place for this work. Look in the project's tracker for help-wanted, there may be something just the right size for you to help with this afternoon.
• FFI
• Function reference organized by category
  Like in Paul Graham's ANSI Common LISP. Perhaps he would donate his book source which could be converted to HTML.
• Potting Soil -- mini-HOWTO's
• Gardeners Documentation
• GUI Toolkits
• Newbie Development Environments
• Portable sockets (Dave Roberts is working on this; he has written a paper that analyzes current APIs and proposes a new one)
• Tutorials
• Windows Implementations
• The seedbag: Miscellaneous Projects Wish List. Look here for some short ideas for other projects. Put "Seed Requests" / "Requests for Gardeners" here, if they're short, or make a new page for them, if they're long.

Transplants: Archived Projects

Superseded by the Package and Resource Directory project:

• Gardeners Package Repository
• Gardeners Resource Directory

What a Project Page should have to receive The Blessing of the Green Thumbs and get Planted

The point of blessing projects is not to create some vast bureaucratic hurdle to getting work done, but to make sure that people who want to help out can do so without a huge hassle. What the Green Thumbs will look for before giving a project a +1 is a project page that:

1. Explains clearly and concisely what the purpose of the project is and why it's a good idea.
2. Explains specifically what the project is going to try to achieve and how the rest of us will know the project is achieving its goals.
3. Explains clearly and concisely how someone can get up to speed and help out the project.

Our goal is that a new gardener should be able to look at any project page for a CL-Gardeners blessed project and easily decide whether it's something they want to work on and then start contributing right away.

Submitting a project, and voting

Send an email to the Gardeners list with a new subject line (i.e. don't reply to an existing message) of something like:

Project Proposal: Package and Resource Directory

with a pointer to the appropriate project page and asking to have it blessed as an official CL Gardener's project.

Then we follow the Apache style voting rules: anyone can vote +1, +0, -0, or -1 (though -1 votes must be accompanied with a counterproposal or explanation). In the end only the votes of the Green Thumbs officially count but it's good for everyone else to take a look at the project and vote accordingly. The main criterion for approving a project is that it is well enough defined that a new Gardener can figure out what the project is about (and thus whether they're interested in helping out) and how to get started contributing.

Obviously since CL Gardeners is going to sponsor a lot of projects there's no need to vote against something just because you're not interested in it; only vote -1 if you think either that the project is poorly defined and thus likely to lead to gardeners wasting their time trying to work on it or if you really feel that doing it will somehow be contrary to the Gardeners' mission of making Common Lisp more attractive. I suspect the latter case will be quite rare.

Avoiding duplicate work

The organisation of projects allows teams to form, organise themselves and distribute the work.

If you're just going to wander over the paddock and pull out a few weeds on your way, you don't need a project. But you might visit the Gardeners Tea Room? beforehand and mention what you're just about to go and do - you might find someone is already headed in that direction, so you can tag along.

A convenient protocol would be to leave date, time, name and what you're up to. Anything more than a week old is probably done (or not) and long forgotten, so if your entry is still current you could update the date occasionally so folks know you're still doing it.

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This page is tended by the Gardeners?.