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.

  • smallcirclesOPM
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    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.