CoderGlue: Let’s Code Together 😉 This topic was inspired by FedeProxy project, and my interactions on their forum. There’s a wink in the title, because “CoderGlue” name and icon design is just a proposal I made, as alternative more descriptive project name. Nothing more than that. Culture and process I really like how the team is setting up the FedeProxy project organisation. A thorough approach, deep thought, and proper preparation. So too on diversity: @anon20068248: Diversity: F...

This SocialHub topic was inspired by Forgefriends (then called FedeProxy) and constitutes a wild brainstorm for envisioning what could be an entirely new paradigm to softwrare development: United Software Development.

Exploration of the idea involves looking from a non-technical perspective at all the possible ways in which Decentralization and fediverse standards (ActivityStreams, ActivityPub, Linked Data) can be leveraged to shape this paradigm.

Preliminary definition of United Sotware Development is “Free, libre software development, processes and culture united,. Sustainable, open and accessible to anyone.”, but I’m sure that can be further improved.

@dachary@lemmy.ml offers a very enticing look into what “Federated Development” might entail. I highly encourage people to read the SocialHub thread, and am very curious about your musings and thoughts.

  • csdummi
    2·
    3 years ago

    Those are great ideas. I’ll try to minimize these into minimum viable product requirements based on the three domain split:

    MVP

    Ideation

    A service which allows the sharing, discussion and concretize ideas.

    It should achieve these minimum features:

    • To create ideas as ActivityPub Objects containing text, tags, and a reference to an Idea it’s based on (if any).
    • To discuss Idea Objects in the Fediverse.
    • To gather the discussion in an easy to view UI.
    • The change of Idea Objects should be possible for the author of the Idea.
    • Any user should be able to create a new Idea based on an existing Idea Object.
    • To generate a feed for users to find new Idea Objects.

    Community Governance

    A service closely working together with the Ideation and project management service.

    It should achieve these minimum features:

    • The creation of a developer community Object (group) based on an Idea.
    • Users to join and leave a community.
    • Users to assign themselves roles, describing their abilities and resources they can provide to the project.
    • Users to vote for a maintainer of the project and communicate this with the project management service.
    • Users to discuss the project on the Fediverse.

    Project Managment

    A forge that hosts the repositories of a project and allows for the Community to change the access levels of developers (Maintainers, Contributors, etc.).

    It should achieve these minimum features:

    • To create repositories for a community.
    • The features of forge (issue trackers, contributions, etc.)
    • To change access levels based on the Community Governance.

    I decided for this three division, because Project Management can be seen as a Forge with some additional features (maybe implemented with just a plugin or bot) and the focus of development should lie on Community Governance and Ideation, the new and unique services.

    I only include those requirements here, which I think can be reasonably implemented in a first release and nothing more.

    • smallcirclesOPM
      1·
      3 years ago

      Wonderful! Just going to add some remarks / thoughts… we might call this the “Social Coding MVP” and when spinning up an app, it is a “social coding platform”.

      Ideation --> Idea Management

      • “Idea Management” appears to be a more common domain name.
      • Federation between social coding instances:
        • Consider a solarpunk.community and a vidartists.social instance.
        • Ideas should be spread far and wide, ideally federate between instances.
        • A solarpunk “low-energy video editing” idea is interesting to vidartists, a “solar panel upcycle” idea is not.
        • There may be need for a Topic as a separate concept. It might be an as:Group on the wire.
        • Instances receive all Topics from across the fedi, then admin subscribes to interesting ones.
        • Only Ideas matching Subscribed Topics are tracked / stored in a particular instance.
      • Federation across the broader fediverse:
        • From any federated app, e.g. Mastodon, a fedizen can Follow a Topic and then get all topical Ideas in their timeline.
        • This works somewhat similar to Gup.pe groups app.
        • If I follow “Video Editing” on vidartists, I will also get Ideas in that topic that were created on solarpunk.
        • I don’t know if de-doubling is handled if I subscribe to the topic on multiple instances.
      • Licensing of ideas
        • Different instances may have different ideas on how Ideas and the comments to them are licensed.
        • The license that applies is determined by the instance that the Idea / Comment was created on.
        • If one replies from e.g. Mastodon, then the license of Idea is used. It should be indicated in the Topic Profile.
      • We can create a diagram and derive our own vocabulary extension for our domain. Interesting prior work:

      Community Governance

      • I’d split this into two separate parts / concepts: Community + Policies
      • Both of these concepts have way broader applicability than our use case, and we can standardize on their definition.

      For a minimal Community vocabulary extension that facilitates having arbitrary ‘Roles’ I suggested modeling them as follows:

      Community vocabulary diagram

      Project Management

      • There is the DOAP Ontology to describe projects (also posted to forgefriends).
      • I guess that the Project Management features here should be mostly informational.
        • Referencing repo’s, tools that may exist anywhere. Insight into any relevant project info.
        • Ensuring that privileges are properly guarded and to the interest of the community as a whole.