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forum.unfinishedprojects.net

cross-posted from: https://piefed.zip/c/foss/p/1548253/we-are-trying-to-grow-a-new-foss-collaboration-community

A few of us have put together a forum and wiki in the hopes to build a community focused on collaboration for various open source and creative commons projects. We build the platform a few months ago, but haven’t done the greatest job of actually spreading the word and building up the active members, so I’m posting in another attempt to try and spread the word to establish some activity for our community.

In short, the idea behind our website is to:

  1. Build a community that is based on genuine connections and collaboration. Our community is a forum and wiki, and hopes to steer towards a slower (and possibly more old school) type of internet - and away from some communities that are mostly article reposts and memes.
  2. Libre/foss/creative commons/etc - we want to help generate community that can come together to work on projects that benefit everyone, and in a way, push back against some of the urges of capitalism.
  3. Involvement - we want to welcome everyone, but the idea is to eventually create a culture where people are not afraid to contribute small things to many projects. We want to motivate individuals to grow the foss ecosystem without feeling like they need to commit heavily to any one project. Projects can get rekindled and improved on even if others have abandoned it.

Overall, we have a big vision for the community - but at this point we are just trying to get it off the ground and are looking for members to sign up and start some discussions to help us grow.

The goal is to create a community that is able to stand on its own, and outlast myself or any of the other admins. And essentially become a commons space, with the current admins simply acting as a steward that can be replaced if they need/want to step down. In that respect, we hope to get some members and allow the community to grow and evolve the platform to fit the needs of the community.

While modern social media has its place, we felt that the current standing of online collaborative spaces were limiting and often highly niche. We hope that maybe we can grow a space for people of various skills, backgrounds, and ideas can come together to create a creative and productive space - and make some lasting connections as well.

I know this post got a bit lengthy, and many will probably skim over it, but if it’s something that sounds interesting to you I would really appreciate it if you came over and checked it out, signed up, and maybe help us get some discussions going to help us grow our community. And of course, if you would be so kind as to helping us spread the word, it would be greatly appreciated - as we spent so much time working on building the site, but none of us are all that great at actually “marketing” the community to actually find new members.

Our forum is: forum.UnfinishedProjects.net

And our wiki, where we hope people will actually build out various projects together is located at:

UnfinishedProjects.net

  • UnfinishedProjects@piefed.zipOPEnglish
    1·
    17 hours ago

    You bring up some valid concerns about the connection between the wiki and forum - and it’s something we were bouncing around on how to best implement. My guess is that as our community grows, we can better adjust and adapt to find the optimal solution.

    As of now, the premise is to have a wiki page for each project that acts as documentation and the actual “home” of the project - as it also allows people to contribute with version history and etc. meanwhile the forum “projects” category will act as the platform for discussion and networking. I will be the first to admit that the implementation may very well be flawed, but is meant to act as a starting point in which the community can nudge the platform to evolve in the direction that will suit the majority.

    As for the distinction of this platform and others, I go a bit more into depth on the wiki about pages and such, but I’m short it’s that:

    1. We are not a niche community. We want to bring people from different backgrounds together to collaborate and network. (Eg: GitHub is mostly programmers)
    2. We encourage small contributions. We want to remove the stress and commitment of needing to dive all in to a single project, and instead foster the community itself, so that people can contribute small things to multiple projects, bolstering the open source and creative commons as a whole, rather than any one single project. (Hopefully that makes sense.)
    3. The goal is to have this platform/community be “community owned/managed/etc”. Granted I am currently paying for th server and domain name, and someone has to have the “keys” to the system to protect sensitive data - but I back up everything to Codeberg so that if I die, disappear, etc… another individual can simply reupload the data and start another site. (A few trusted admins have full backup capabilities as well). In addition to just backups, I want the community to actually have individuals step up and take more active roles - have a group of stewards of the commons, rather than owners or founders. How this will work in practice I am not yet entirely sure…but the underlying intentions are that ownership of th community should belong to the collective, with individuals acting as stewards of the platform in the best interest of the majority.

    Hope that answers the questions? Also, thank you so much for the thoughtful feedback :)

    PS: if you’ve joined, I would appreciate it if you would post on the forum or upload your projects…as the more activity we get, the easier it will be to get new members on board and engaged.