This is the Alloytools discussion site. Discuss any issue you feel like as long as it is related to formal modeling and/or Alloy.
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and, let’s start by arguing over goals 
I suggest we cut any expectations about posts and start by making the site as welcoming as possible. Once we’re overloaded with content we can cut things back…
Where to begin? I find the rubric at the top of this discussion extremely unwelcoming. I’m told that it is meant to head off students who want their homework done for them. Well, I can understand that, but if this list, channel, board, whatever it is, is the kind of thing where random people can come and post random questions, maybe it isn’t the right medium for the kind of group who don’t want that behaviour.
Meanwhile, I’m an industrial practitioner. My problem domain is messy and gnarly and difficult because it relates to arbitrary human constructs. As an industrial practitioner this is the sort of problem which interests me. My problems were not reverse engineered from a neat solution that is meant to make a student have a “lightbulb moment”. But the rubric primes me to fear being dismissed as trivial.
I’m not going to sit an exam on this stuff. In seeking help with how to use Alloy effectively in my industrial setting I am not cheating, and I’m not losing out on some learning point. I’m a working stiff trying to learn to use what looks like a valuable tool to add value for my clients. If the rubric at the top stands, then I’m in the wrong place. Which would be a shame (for me) because Alloy is desperately short of good tutorial material aimed at anyone who isn’t doing a module on a course that uses Alloy, and that’s a shame (for Alloy) because I’m sure that there’s a whole load of industrial practitioners like me who could get a lot of benefit from the tool but won’t, unless they happened to do that module at some institution, because there’s no way in, so it will miss out on widespread adoption.
As an experiment, I tried asking a question on SO. It was immediately closed and I was scolded by users there with no obvious connection to Alloy or Electrum. I do not believe that SO is a viable channel for us.