Community: Taking the next step forward.

I want to talk about teamwork and collaboration today. But first, I need to tell you about some things going on right now, and how they can impact us in a big way. As you might have read yesterday, we are opening up the Diaspora project to be the community-run project that it should have been in the first place. In the past, the user and developer communities wanted to have better representation in the project that they loved and contributed to. With a community-driven model, we can get around these problems. The question, of course, is how do we get there? I'm going to have to use the G word. No, not Google. Governance. In order to make our project more receptive to the needs of its users, we have to figure out how the community should work. For that, I have a working proposal. Think of it as an overreaching plan to get from where we are now to something with an efficient community that makes its own decisions. Of course, I am open to feedback on ways to make this plan even better. Here's the gist of it: work on what you want to work on. Talk to the community about it, and get feedback. Those that want to work together are encouraged to start up teams, and these teams should talk to one another to help keep everyone's needs in check. There has been some great reception to opening up our Pivotal Tracker, as there are a lot of developers registered on it, you can join by clicking here. To keep everyone from stepping on each other's toes, I have a set of guidelines to follow to make this as painless as possible for everyone. For a quick tutorial on how to use it, click here. This is a very exciting time to be a part of our project. Let's get out there together and help the decentralized social web grow.

Comments

Sean Tilley's picture

Sean Tilley

Tue, 08/28/2012 - 13:40

Hey Adrian, that's really interesting! I'll be sure to take a look at it.

Bugsbane

Mon, 09/03/2012 - 23:50

I don't even use Ubuntu, but Launchpad is pretty sweet. A good combo of tracking code, questions, updates, comments, activity on other trackers etc.

Pity it's so tied to bzr instead of Git :/ (although I haven't checked in a while...)

Bugsbane

Mon, 09/03/2012 - 23:54

Personally I would like to encourage as much of the dev discussion to happen *on* Diaspora as possible, rather than isolating it from the actual Diaspora community.

To that end, I would recommend adding groups functionality as a fairly high priority, so teams (as mentioned at https://github.com/diaspora/diaspora/wiki/Community-Governance-Proposal ) can actually organize and discuss on Diaspora, where it's easy for the community to take part.

Flaburgan (chev...

Thu, 08/30/2012 - 06:41

"This account is on a 60 day free trial, which allows for unlimited number of projects and project members. Your free trial expires on Oct 28, 2012. "

I'm not sure this is a good idea to switch to pivotal tracker if we have to pay for use it !

Is it because i'm not accepted in the Diaspora project yet ?

Altruism

Fri, 08/31/2012 - 02:10

Sounds odd, I wonder what plan does Diaspora have. "Is Tracker really free for public projects, individual use, non-profits, and educators? Yes! Paid plans are required only in order to create private projects with collaborators other than yourself, or if you require more than 5 private projects." (www.pivotaltracker.com).

Sean Tilley's picture

Sean Tilley

Fri, 08/31/2012 - 16:37

Hey Altruism,

Initially, we used Pivotal Tracker internally on the core team, however admittedly it's not super-super-great for community development. At the moment, I'm exploring alternatives that are more conducive to community governance.

Altruism

Fri, 08/31/2012 - 02:14

I agree! Diaspora can learn a lot from Debian. And when it comes to documentation, look at Arch and Gentoo.

Adrian

Tue, 08/28/2012 - 13:20

Have you played with Better Means tracker at all? It's built on something else, I forget what exactly...but skinned to look a lot like Pivotal, and is intended to be used for community-governed projects. Might help make the transition easier, and it's free (I think under GPL or similar- last I checked they hadn't finished embedding the new license in its code, it also used to be a startup-company project.)

Raven24

Tue, 08/28/2012 - 15:29

Here are some links courtesy of user Altruism on diasp.org about open-source governance models ... quite interesting

http://www.oss-watch.ac.uk/resources/governanceModels.xml
http://www.zdnet.com/blog/murphy/apaches-open-source-governance-model/1196

Sean Tilley's picture

Sean Tilley

Tue, 08/28/2012 - 16:59

Thanks Florian, these might be really handy. :)

Altruism

Wed, 08/29/2012 - 15:01

Thanks Florian, good to see that you did what you told me that you would do :)

Altruism

Wed, 08/29/2012 - 15:04

Adrian, thank you for that information. I did not know about Better Means, it looks very interesting.

Praveen

Wed, 08/29/2012 - 21:28

Hi Sean,

Debian might be a good model to look at. It won't be a one to one match, but many ideas like social contract, consitution and membership can be taken from it.

Praveen