Loomio
Tue 13 Nov 2012 10:00PM

Boost Diaspora improvement

F Flaburgan Public Seen by 95

Hi guys.

I'd like to make a point about the Diaspora Project.
Some awesome refactor, clean up and bug fix were made since Diaspora became a community driven project. But if we speak about features, nothing has changed for a year. This is terrible, because G+ and other FOSS social networks didn't wait us.

I think Diaspora has to be boosted and present some killer features / announcement before the end of this year, or we will definitely be dead.

Our problem right now is that we don't have a lot of devs. It is hard to find contributors, and people able to develop new features, because this requires a global vision of the project and a LOT of time. Contributors here have a job and can't work only on Diaspora. I think that we have to find devs who can work everyday on the project.

The first solution to this is to pay people directly. But for that, we need money, and it is hard to find, because people waited a lot of Diaspora and many of them are disappointed. We can't make another thing like "kickstarter". Maybe a donation campaign, but it will not be enough for the long term.

So this is my second solution. We are a FOSS project. Maybe we can be helped by other FOSS, not with money, but with their experience, with their reputation, maybe with their developers. Let's dream, and imagine that we convince Redhat or Mozilla to use Diaspora internally. It could be used for a lot of things. Everybody puts social in everything nowadays.. If they use our soft, they will be obliged to patch it for their interest. And of course, the patch will be merged in the master branch. Everyone will be happy : our soft will be improved without spending money and they can use it.

So the hardest part to do is to convince them that to use our soft can be really useful for them.

I propose to you to list here every arguments, use cases, everything which can be said to convince them.

JDP

Jônatas Davi Paganini Wed 14 Nov 2012 1:37AM

Hi diaspora guys. I really understand the Flaburgan point.

Now, I'll talk about the own opensource parasite I am.

I'm working at diaspora ~2 hours per day (in the last 2 weeks) in special features for a customer. It's all about be openess and so organized. more than 70% of his features could be open. I believe they can agree with. But the problem for me is about be organized and start getting everything fine.

I implement some specs, all my tests are running but I really start mixturing my features and there's no reserved time to push it back to the master.

There are more then 1500 forks and no merges from the community but I think a lot of people face the same.

RF

Rasmus Fuhse Wed 14 Nov 2012 7:54AM

I think a lot of people stopped donating for the Diaspora-project, because they don't know where their money is actually going now. We should probably create a foundation or an association to which everyone can spend money to and be sure that this money goes directly into software-development. This money might also be spent for outsourcing development to good old Diaspora-inc, because they surely know best about the code and about good UI. But it could also be spent for developers that have awesome features in their pipe and all they need is a bit of time and probably support with money to get the time.

JR

Jason Robinson Wed 14 Nov 2012 11:59AM

Jônatas, hopefully you can convince your customer that by doing the effort of pushing the changes (or at least some of them which can be pushed) to upstream, it will allow their fork to keep up in line with upstream and thus they can keep enjoying the advances done in upstream. If you don't push anything back it is possible your fork will degrade from the upstream code very quickly.

E

Elm Sun 18 Nov 2012 8:29AM

I am not a member of the github site so I do not know about how many developers and what amount of time is given to D*. Maybe a sum up about that and a communication would be usefull to the community.

I am not used to open source developement and how it works but to me having an identified core-team is important for communication and image. For now the only core team I see from a glimpse is Sean.

As for the arguments, I do not know…

JR

Jason Robinson Sun 18 Nov 2012 9:43AM

@loelo, definitely agree that some kind of core team is needed, not just code but other responsibilities too.

There is a core team when we talk in the context of code - that core team can be found here: https://github.com/diaspora?tab=members .. however of those guys and gals I have only seen MrZYX, denschub, DeadSuperHero, grzuy, maxwell and Raven24 actively lately (last few months).

For other core members we don't really have any other teams where membership is not open or person who have been designated for a particular role. This is because the community governance model is just starting for Diaspora* so we have not had the chance to set up the organization etc - I guess it will happen when it needs to be done.