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:
- 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.
- 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.
- 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
I want to love this, and I just signed up, but I think I fail to see this platform's differentiator: why would I go there rather than any of the other communities/forums that already exist? For example, I develop a tool for music performance/production in Pure Data, what will I find on UnfinishedProjects that I wouldn't find on LinuxMusicians or Pure Data's forum? I tinker with Arduino, why would I go to UnfinishedProjects rather than an Arduino forum? I'm slowly building my own answer as I write this, but IMO that's what this post and the welcome page should be answering clearly: Why join this, rather than the thousand other options?
Also, as far as I understand, the wiki is meant to be an easy-to-browse directory of all projects that may already be discussed somewhere in the forum, but I see no clear connection between them. If I find an interesting project in the wiki, shouldn't there be a simple way to find and join existing conversations on that topic? And the other way around, it would be nice to build a wiki page from information entered in the forum itself. I'm just thinking that any extra step in creating and finding stuff will slow down the growth of the platform.
Apologies if I just missed existing features, I've only spent 20min on it and I'm trying to give constructive first-impression feedback :)