Names for communities on different levels

Community
1

Hey,

I find the split at the top level of this forum into these categories super confusing:

#community
#meeting
#fediversity

For me there are three communities here:

  • this forum users community and topics related to its governance
  • communities of contributors to federated software projects and those projects governance
  • communities of users of federated software projects
  • (maybe also worth separating) a community of users-admins of federated software projects

An alternative proposition for names might be:

  • meta
  • fediverse contributors community
  • fediverse users community

I mainly wanted to point out my confusion and my proposition may be not much better, more verbose but also maybe a little bit more descriptive. Anyways, I don’t feel attached to it at all.

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2

Hi @mariha,

There’s a lot of improvement that can be made. There’s also few people and available time to make them and maintain this forum. To the extent even that I call SocialHub “just a forum” right now, instead of a real community.

I find those three categories less confusing when adding their description to it:

  • #community: Discussion about this site, its organization, how it works, and how we can improve it.
  • #meeting: Planning and following ActivityPub-related events and gatherings.
  • #fediversity: Understanding and discovering communities on this emerging social network that is the Fediverse.

So Community is about organization of the forum / SocialHub itself. Meeting is announcement of any fedi-related events anyone organizes. And Fediversity is sort of a “news about the fediverse” general category.

There does not exist right now a good definition of who this community is for and what its objectives are. I think SocialHub started out as a very technical-oriented companion space to the W3C SocialHub, mostly focused on discussing evolutions to the ActivityPub standards and how to incorporate them into federated apps. The audience were mostly fedi devs and ‘experts in the field’.

A general problem on the fedi is making onboarding of new devs easier and also to involve less-technical oriented folks in the community. I have been adding topics targeting a broader audience and advocating more diverse member base. Not always to everyone’s appreciation, btw.

If we want to make improvements, then more people should be willing to help do community work on an ongoing basis, or any effort will stall. And when doing so we should determine with broader consensus what this community is about and what it wants to achieve.

3

Thanks for doing what you are doing, I especially appreciate your crossposting information between projects and this way connecting different groups of people and slowly growing them into one community. It must be a tedious work for sure, as a gardener of a community by myself, much smaller, less active and not very productive, I guess I can understand you to some extent
 and I believe sometimes it’s also ok to let it go and it’s ok if your garden is not that perfect :wink:

(btw I strongly prefer English gardens style to French one, might be a good inspiration/metaphor/parallel for open source projects maintenance too
)

I wanted to cross post a link, I’ve read descriptions of top categories and looked inside what do people post there, started this topic and looked inside each category again, and I still don’t know where does it belongs:

This is the link I wanted to share: How I recruit and mentor contributors and how you should, too - 📣 Sustainer Talk - Sustain Open Source Forum

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4

Thank you @mariha :pray: I really like your French vs. English garden style analogy and agree that English is the best fit for what we do. I created a Social Coding practice topic on “Community Digital Gardens” for FOSS projects, and will mention that there.

Yes, it can be tedious work, but also can be rewarding. It is planting seeds all the time, and there is a self-interest too as activity is all on topics I’d like to do more with in the future. I started calling this “weaving in public”: making people aware of each other’s work and on topics that interest me. Encourage collab. I do it in addition to learning in public. It’s all digital gardening I guess :slight_smile:

Nice post. I added VolunteerWatch to delightful funding candidate list. It is not an upcoming webinar for #meeting and only sideways related to Fediverse, so in this case I think #fediversity is the best category to post in.

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