Ruby is now 18 years old. It has become a very mature project and the developers that have been using it are a lot more mature now as well. Our community has long since crossed the chasm and we are in the early majority stage. This means that even though we have many people who are well versed in the language we are again having an influx of new people. I want to help those new people feel comfortable enough to believe they can learn and become just as mature as the oldies who are part of the community. Also, I want to educate the oldies on how they can better help out these newbies.
The Ruby community has become very much like any other close-knit community. We are very biased towards certain philosophies such as agile development, pair programming, and TDD. Some might compare our community to other close-knit organizations such as fraternities/sororities, athletic clubs and the freemasons. They all have very idealistic philosophies they run their organizations on. I want to show how we compare to these types of organizations. I want to highlight the good things we adopted from running our community this way as well as the bad. I want to show how we can improve and fix the bad habits so that we can create a more open community for new people to join and feel welcomed.