Community-driven language development

Software development processes are becoming more collaborative, trying to integrate end-users as much as possible. The idea is to advance towards a community-driven process where all actors (both technical and nontechnical) work together to ensure that the system-to-be will satisfy all expectations. This seems specially appropriate in the field of Domain-Specific Languages (DSLs) typically designed to facilitate the development of software for a particular domain. DSLs offer constructs closer to the vocabulary of the domain which simplifies the adoption of the DSL by endusers. Interestingly enough, the development of DSLs is not a collaborative process itself. In this sense, the goal of this paper is to propose a collaborative infrastructure for the development of DSLs where end-users have a direct and active participation in the evolution of the language. This infrastructure is based on Collaboro, a DSL to represent change proposals, possible solutions and comments arisen during the development and evolution of a language.