Indeed the problem is expectations. If people expect to see fresh information on activitypub.rocks and they cannot, or they expect to be able to update this site, and they cannot, there is a problem. Indeed we could decide than anyone could host ‘official resources’, but then, more SPoFs, and a dilution of information.
Ideally all information about the Fediverse should go to the Fediverse. In the meantime we need collective ways to facilitate cooperation, not clog it. It’s not a difficult thing to do and I bet @cwebber would be more than inclined to do it. He’s just super busy as usual. But if the Social CG comes to a reasonable proposal, things could be moving forward fast. I think one of the issues why it didn’t was the apparent lack of response to the How to hack on activitypub.rocks : MRs were merged but issues were not taken care of and no more MRs were proposed, nor did the topic seems to interest anyone. One way to fix this would be to add more members to the project, so that we’d have a volunteer team whose role would be to keep this site up to date. Another would be start over somewhere else. In the meantime we can Publish pages for AP guides on activitypub.rocks collectively, here.
Being a bottleneck is not a judgement, it’s a fact. The discussion should revolve around possible ways to remove any bottleneck in this community while remaining cohesive enough that we don’t go each our own way, which would not be a great outcome.
The best I’ve seen is to use a tool like https://www.loomio.org/ to help with that. i.e. come up with a good-enough way of making proposals, voting on them, and enforcing a time limit to reach approximate consensus, then let a robot do the busywork of tallying votes, sending reminder emails, etc.
Tbh, I am against that. What Loomio offers could as well be done in similar ways on this Discourse forum, and would not require a new separate tool. Note that, when I tried Loomio I found it severely lacking as a discussion forum UX-wise… still years behind Discourse in that regard.
It does not support everything in the same way that Loomio supports, but additional workarounds can be found, I think. By default Discourse supports polls, and they have some settings to configure them. E.g. a public vote:
Howto tally community votes?
Let’s use Loomio for voting
Discourse has sufficient functionality
0voters
In addition you can specify topic templates for a specific subcategory, and it can include Mentions, so that email notifications are sent. And in that way there are many other ways to make things easier. Also on Discourse Meta forum there are many theme components and plugins that we may consider to make this power tool even more powerful.
Update: Multipl-choice voting (in this example restricted for trust_level_2 and above, and not public)
Elect the two members of the XYZ team
Alice
Bob
Alex
Zena
0voters
It is not ranked, however, but when the results are in you can see the number of votes per candidate. If two have equal votes, you can do an additional poll.
The main difference I see between Discourse and Loomio is that the former focuses on conversation, that forces people to explain their thoughts and find a way to compose with each other, while the latter focuses on “voting tools” that cuts shorts options to what the powerful being in charge of casting the voting options can come up with. Personally I do not appreciate technological solutions to social (and political) issues. Loomio hes this shortcoming for me that it delegates proper discussion to expedients.