The problem is not a lack of resources or volunteers. This topic alone is full of people offering both.
I agree with @melvincarvalho that a person leaving a project should “step down considerately”. Not destroy the project to save it from their (perceived) political enemies, by refusing to share admin access with other members of the project wanting to continue it, unless those members first comply with some arbitrary list of conditions.
The main barrier to this kind of experiment would be getting access to an export of the full archive of public posts made to SH. I presume admin powers are required to export this. It would be a show of good faith for someone with admin powers to export such an archive, and make it available in a neutral location.
That way, even if this Discourse instance were to vanish in a puff of smoke, we would at least retain access to our public history. Ideally in a form that could be imported into a new forum instance (Discourse or otherwise), if that’s the consensus. But a static archive that keeps existing links alive would be better than nothing.
I would like to follow up to @jdp23 and @DameO from a perspective of Social experience design (SX) which is focused on the end-to-end solution design process, from the first inception of an idea, through all evolutionary stages, till the eventual phasing out of the solution at the end of its life where its value disperses.
If you look at what ails many FOSS projects in achieving their own set goals and ambitions, is that they don’t consider and plan for this end to end process. Which leads to a broad range of problems and challenges. Here’s where SX considers the Free software development lifecycle to bring solace.
I feel something similar applies to many forms of activism. Where also steps in the process are missing, and the desired outcome isn’t achieved. I deeply admire how fiercely you both raise awareness to these important subjects, and I recognize in your dedication the same passion with which I facilitated SocialHub for years. You both manage to reach people, shake them up so they are awake, and point out urgent things to improve. Awareness-raising → Activation. Required steps in any Activism process. But it is also only just one step. What does the complete process look like? What is the goal and the strategy? Why doesn’t Activation happen? Food for process improvement.
These questions may be a great kick-off on the DEI theme in the new community. Starting as mere discussion forum, and with potential to find proactive participation to go next steps beyond Activism/Awareness stage and into ‘Solution design’ stages of the ‘activism lifecycle’.
Once this situation is resolved I agree that there’s a good opportunity for lessons learned. I’m not sure what the well-being team is doing behind the scenes
I think the problem is that there is no well-being team, and there’s no active stafff other than @how. Hence I encourage the people who volunteered in the community team to become more proactive in moving things forward. As mentioned twice before @how can assign people in moderator and admin roles, so they are able to get the ball rolling.
Community team, how do you feel about my suggestion you write a Community plan with ideas for direction and governance of the reinvigorated SocialHub? So other members may react to it.
I’m relatively new here but would like to help if I can
I have seen this do-ocracy term here, but I have not yet found an entry point for where someone could easily identify a collection of work items that could be taken on
. Which ties into my own interest I’ve been researching for use of ActivityPub for communication in Project Management tools for FOSS and other community led projects.
I’d favour having an informal chat where anyone interested can join in, or observe. Say, in a new matrix channel for socialhub.next, where posts can be read asynchonously (for folks with limited time).
That is super @thorn, welcome to SocialHub. Creating a list of TODO items is what the community team might do to start, create the Community plan as I suggested above. A wiki post that anyone can edit is 🌻 SocialHub Reboot Wiki
(Ideally @how would give some of you staff privileges, and then this wiki can be reassigned to system user instead of to me, and lock the thread directly under the wiki, so that it bumps in the topic list on each edit.)
I don’t think anyone is advocating handing over a community irresponsibly. @strypeyhas indicated not to be willing to discuss in reason in this thread as per the well-being procedure of SocialHub. And I don’t think he still volunteers for the community team anymore, and neither would that be a good idea with such behavior and unresolved conflicts lingering.
But please consider that whole stressful event - topic of this wellbeing incident - separately from your valid desire to hand over custodianship of SocialHub in a responsible manner. As I mentioned, with all the people who stepped up, viable reboot options are on the table. It is totally understandable, and to me very relatable, to say “things feel like a growing burden now, and I want out”. Yet for that to happen I think you are the one that needs to put in at least some effort to get the ball rolling. You need to take the initial lead, arrange a vidcall or something with the community team and deal with matters of the custodianship transfer and handover of duties.
(PS. I notice and inform that this post above was moved from Community > Well-Being by @how but was made in the context of an ongoing well-being discussion.)
I think it is the case that people who volunteered are in a wait-and-see mode and need help to get onboarded. They need clarity on what their roles can be. And get a feel of the new organizational arrangements, to gauge viability of the community and provide motivation. As a start - dunno you did that already - these folks need forum privileges. It is also unclear whether you want to transfer custodianship from P.S to Angus and pavilion.tech
I think I repeated the same stuff over the years. There are teams and hosts people can apply to. I don’t think one can get from nothing to moderator in any community just by asking for it. If someone has this ability here, it’s you @aschrijver. You stepped down long ago and yet you’re still the most active person in the place. Maybe you’d like admin, then you can take over the process. If @angus and The Pavilion want to take over, what’s the sentiment of the community?
I can no longer afford to spend so much time volunteering. I am out of runway, savings and need sustenance, decent income. Also I have moved on to dedicate to Social experience design at Social coding commons, which includes focus on establishment of grassroots standardization processes within larger decentralized technology ecosystems. Here’s where I hope Hobby turns to Work (and vice versa).
I think best next step then is to address the volunteers directly, @angus@melvincarvalho@Hanse00 and @lullis. The road is open, the floor is yours. Tell @how what you need, so he can facilitate you in that.
Personally I’d be delighted, and I think that this may give a lot of opportunity to combine a developer / fediverse facing community with spaces where forum federation matures well beyond its current “bolt it onto microblogging” phase.
See also my recent post on the concept of “Community” and relation to forum software:
Community, cohesion, unison. That right there might a be a topic that can give a whole community direction and purpose.
I think it’s worth being a bit careful in making sure we all understand what we’re agreeing to. “Take over” could be interpreted in many ways.
I’m not personally against Pavilion taking on the role of administering the hosting of the SocialHub. As long as that role doesn’t come with the assumption that the company should have some outsized control over the discussions that go on within the forum.
I’m not implying that I think @angus personally has that goal in mind, I don’t know them personally. Just highlighting it as a general risk of giving a commercial entity control of our data here. It’s a lot of trust (It would be a lot of trust in anyone who is given the keys to the castle of course).
I think it would be reasonable to expect that if a majority of the active forum participants in the future wish to take hosting away from this commercial entity, we should have the power to do so. But I’m not opposed to this as a step in the direction of relieving @how of the burden they clearly wish to get rid of.
Sorry I didn’t get a chance to do this yet, international wire transfers are annoying and I’ve been in and out the past couple of weeks. Thank you for renewing the domain, I’m publicly committing myself to making a financial contribution soon.
You raise some good points there, and that must certainly be discussed. As I understood @angus offer things would boil down to Pavilion Tech taking the custodianship role of upholding/maintaining the server and Discourse forum software. And to continue to use it as a staging ground for testdriving experimental features of the ActivityPub plugin (which has become an official Discourse plugin, I think). Community team volunteers would then pick up moderator and admin privileges to facilitate the community itself. Discussion of “Community plan”
The new website of Pavilion Tech (which has performance issues in firefox due to loading of external resources.. reported that to Angus before) does not provide much information about the company AFAICS. The old website did a better job here, and copying from archive.org Pavilion is a cooperative that works (I think established in Estonia and operating in the US?) that enables freelancers to add value to existing software products like Discourse:
We Empower Freelancers. We provide reliable work, support and education for freelancers, the members of Pavilion. Our members work on engaging projects that directly support their livelihood, pay no membership fees, and keep every dollar they earn.
But @angus is much better equiped to give a proper reply here
You are correct in stating this. In the case that SocialHub remains a mostly fully public community (maybe with the exception of a well-being space and staff discussion category) the trust involves that a) that data is kept available to the public which falls under the custodianship role, and b) that the Pavilion will not use the community space for product placement or direct advertising of their consultancy services. And if b) happens, then Pavilion is held by GDPR regulation to allow any member to exercise their digital rights. To further mitigate b) a regular archive may be exported to some location, which allows forking of the community in case of such developments, same as is common for FOSS projects.
Just a note that yes, Pavilion is a business, however the entity itself is a non-profit workers cooperative. We have hosted many open source projects over the eight years we’ve been operating, and have been involved in multiple initiatives in both the open source and cooperative movement. If you want to do some more due diligence on the structure you can review it here:
