We recently wrapped up season six of ScalaBridge, with a review of the past season and a discussion of what we want to see next year. To be honest, entering the review I wasn't feeling optimistic about ScalaBridge's future. In the two years since resuming I feel we haven't found a structure that really works. Partly this is the environment we're in; everything is harder now than it was before COVID. However, I still feel we're failing to deliver what the people want, which is most clearly reflected in our high dropout rate. I left the review in a completely different mood, excited for the future. In this post I'm talking about the changes that we're looking to implement, and how we're going to do it. I've distilled the feedback into three interconnected themes, content, community, and connection, which I discuss below.

Content

A consistent request was for better content: specifically more clarity on what people will be doing and learning, and projects that let people create something they can feel proud of and show to others.

Our existing material is of variable quality. I think Creative Scala is pretty good, but it's aimed a true beginners who aren't ready to take on a full project. Everything else is, I think, not where we want it to be. For the future we're going to develop a number of projects that:

• are very clear on their learning goals;
• build to creating something tangible;
• are open-ended for those who want to explore further;
• cover a range of different skill levels; and
• cover a range of different domains.

Creating this content is going to be a lot of work, so our plan is to use the first semester of season seven to do this.

Community

People wanted to feel more of a sense of community. They want to work with other people to build fun and inspiring stuff, and they want to feel that ScalaBridge in an exciting group to be part of. There are few ways we'll make that happen.

Firstly, we've long claimed that ScalaBridge is a community-run organisation. We're going to make that more of a reality by delegating much more of the organisational work. This one is on me, and I've already taken steps to start the process.

We're going to be much clearer on groups and attendance, which will be helped by the work we're doing on content. We'll continue to start each semester by assigning groups, and we'll ask those groups to decide on an attendance schedule and nominate a leader who will be responsible for chasing everyone.

Since we are all working on projects, we'll spend more time at the end of each semester showing each other what we've built and celebrating our achievements.

Finally, we'll run more purely social events.

Connection

Finally, we want more connection to others outside ScalaBridge. A few ways we will try to achieve this:

• we'll use social media to show what we have created, not just announce events;
• we'll try to connect to other communities that might be interested in what we're doing; and
• we are tentatively planning a summer time conference as a showcase and celebration, and a way to engage with the wider community.

Next Steps

Talk is easy; implementation is what counts. Most of the details will be worked out on our Discord, so make sure you drop in there if you want to contribute.