Bringing Rails and Merb together is about more than just merging the respective code. We’re also picking up the best ideas from both communities beyond the code. Following on Merb’s success in offering a strong evangelism effort, we’re pleased to announce the creation of the Rails activists:

The mission of the Rails activists is to empower and support the worldwide network of Ruby on Rails users. We do this by publicizing Rails, making adoption easier, and enhancing developer support.

At launch, we’ve identified seven areas where the Rails activists can contribute to the Rails ecosystem:

• Public Relations with media of all sizes
• Ombudsman work to ensure good user-to-user support
• Community Leadership at events and conferences
• Media Organization to help create good promotional opportunities
• Website maintenance
• Documentation efforts
• Developer support

The initial members of the Rails activists are Gregg Pollack, Matt Aimonetti, Ryan Bates, and Mike Gunderloy. But we can’t do all this alone, nor do we want to! Our vision includes a large and vibrant Rails network composed of other activists, bloggers, event hosts, authors, and developers. Our intent is to provide connections, resources, and support to help the entire ecosystem to grow. To start things off, we’re bringing in a lot of our own projects, including videos, screencasts, case studies, Rails documentation, and more – we’re a working group, and we hope you’ll work with us.

If you have ideas about improving the Rails community, projects you want to participate in, or are just looking for ways to get involved, get in touch with us! There are a lot of ways to do that:

• Through the new Rails activism Google group.
• Through the Rails feedback site, where you can vote on which projects you’d like to see us devote resources to in the Rails 3 timeframe and beyond.
• Through our Twitter accounts (linked above)
• Through IRC to Matt (mattetti) or Mike (mikeg1a)
• Through email to Mike Gunderloy, Matt Aimonetti, Gregg Pollack, or Ryan Bates.

We look forward to hearing from you!

For additional perspectives from the activists, see the posts by Gregg Pollack, Matt Aimonetti, and Mike Gunderloy.

Photo by Flickr user caravinagre