Summary of the meeting this month; thank you to Taylor Waggoner for taking detailed notes:
It was suggested there could be greater community engagement on social media. One platform that has improbably become popular among tech people is LinkedIn. There
an existing TLA+ group LinkedIn but it is not active. For evangelization purposes, the "group" entity type does not seem to be the most effective as people prefer posting to the global feed; instead, a TLA+ "company" entity should be formed which boosts posts by community members or starts discussions. The
Antithesis company account was mentioned as a good prototype for how this might look. The January outreach meeting can decide the particulars of who runs this account.
It was also suggested that an alternative to the mailing list could be set up for quick chat, such as a Zulip instance. However, community traffic might not be high enough for this to be worth monitoring. Years ago a mattermost instance was set up and then shut down for inactivity reasons.
One suggestion was that TLA+ community members should research & attend local systems meetups, which tend to be well-attended and receptive to formal specification presentations. The action item here would be for anybody reading this to look into upcoming meetups in their locale then register for them, even if only as an attendee instead of a presenter.
Personally I am writing the quarterly development update newsletter for the October - December 2025 timeframe. These newsletters are probably a good thing but for me it just feels like a large chore at this point. I do not know whether I will commit to doing the January - March newsletter.
Other content creation requests involved more material about TLA+ and Rust, since Rust can statically analyze some concurrency properties but not all. Short 10-15 minute recorded chats between TLA+ community members posted online podcast-clip-style would also be fun; I know personally the conversations I have with people here tend to be a big pull keeping me in the community.
Andrew