Future of Ionide brand

[Krzysztof-Cieslak]

CC:

• @dsyme
• @cartermp
• @forki
• @ReedCopsey - FSSF is official owner of FSAC
• @enricosada - owner of dotnet-proj-info and main FSAC maintainer
• @duckmatt - FSharpLint maintainer
• @jindraivanek - maintainer of Mechanic and Fantomas (?)

Before going to details - everything below is just an idea, nothing is decided, I hope this thread can be good place for discussing it.

As I've already mentioned publicly (on Twitter - https://twitter.com/k_cieslak/status/1134175755632631809, or on Open Collective page - https://opencollective.com/ionide) my longer term plan for Ionide (as brand) is making it more about community driven, cross platform, F# developer tooling rather than just single VSCode plugin. This is caused by simple fact - only smart part of what is visible in Ionide-VSCode to end users is plugin development - Ionide-VSCode is a thin layer (with lot of useful UX improvements) and most of the features. Additional, Ionide organization is already home for more projects than just Ionide-VSCode - editor independent projects like Forge or FsInteractiveService are already there.

I'd hope we may all think together whether such idea has sense (from F# ecosystem point of view), and if you'd be willing to move some of the tooling projects into Ionide organization - many of them are in general fsprojects organization, FSAC is on FSSF organization (and I believe Reeds want to change that).

In case this idea works out such change of emphasis would include:

• rework of ionide.io page to feature multiple projects belonging to Ionide organization, rather than showing just VSCode plugin
• rework Open Collective page to put more emphasis on the fact that we (Ionide contributors) are mostly working on the multiple projects that helps general F# community, not only Ionide-VSCode
• change the communication from @IonideProject twitter account

The positive results of this transformation and putting multiple projects in single place would include:

• Having common branding - success of Ionide itself, or for example SAFE shows us that marketing and strong branding helps to make projects successful, it would also be a good message when we try to "sell" F# to people - "look, we have this community driven organization that works together on cross platform tooling, it's great"
• Improving communication, updates flow, etc - it's just easier when everything is in single place
• potentially, using Open Collective resource in a way that helps everyone - for example, one of things I want to do with OC money is contracting technical writer that would work on the Ionide documentation, I don't see a reason why this effort couldn't be done for multiple projects

Also, just to be clear - this is not about taking ownership of the projects, it's just about putting them in one place... I have enough my own projects to take care about ;-)

[dsyme]

Sounds like a plan

[cartermp]

I think dotnet-proj-info is a very natural one to migrate over. Not sure how I feel about FSAC.

[jindraivanek]

Paging @nojaf as co-maintainer of Fantomas.

[nojaf]

Hello, I would prefer that Fantomas is not included in the initial phase. We could move at a later point, for now, I'm not really convinced.