On the occasion of the start of my second year participating in Perlmonks, a meditation on what (and who) makes a site like Perlmonks work.

Thanks to tye for ascii-art and to the assembled and disassembled monks for a fun and informative year. 

When partners feed the community,
software supports the transformation of the audience,
content is at the root of the software,
and purpose is at the root of the content,
a tree grows in codeland.


                                                      (   (   )
                                                     (      )  )
                                                    (___(_______)
                                                     | |\ V /| |
                                                     @ @ \ / @ @
                                                         | |
                                                         | |
                                                      +-------+
                                      +-----------+   |Partner|
                           +-------+  |  Active   |   +-------+
              +-------+    |Regular|  |participant|       |
              |Visitor|    | user  |  +-----------+  Collaboration
+---------+   +-------+    +-------+        |           tools
|potential|       |            |       Communication      |
|audience | Accessibility  Usability      tools           |
+---------+    design       design          |             |
     |            |            |            |             |
+----------------------------------------------------------------+
|                        Community portal                        |
+----------------------------------------------------------------+
     |                   |                  |              |
   Content             Portal            Portal        Security &
  management         management        plug-in SW     connectivity
    tools               tools         design tools       tools
     |                       \       /                     |
 +---------+               +----------+                 +------+
 | Content |_Collaboration_|  Portal  |__Collaboration__| Site |
 |providers|    tools      |management|       tools     |admins|
 +---------+               |   team   |                 +------+
                           +----------+
                             /      \
                       Data        Collaboration
                    management         tools
                      tools               \
                       /                +----------+
                  +-------+             |  Portal  |
                  |Content|             | software |
                  +-------+             |developers|
                                        +----------+

In reply to A tree grows in codeland by jZed

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.