FOSS cooperatives - A white paper (?)
Michele Kipiel PublicSeen by 71Hi all,
following the few toots I exchanged with @doubleloop earlier today, I figured we could gather resources and maybe even collaboratively write something around FOSS and cooperatives. As I said on the instance, it could be interesting for communities to evolve past the current model of loose, voluntary particpation and embrace that of the cooperative. Such a change would not only provide better financial stability, but would also rid the FOSS environment of the "benevolent dictator" and usher in a new era of democratic decisionmaking and accountability.
As @doubleloop pointed out, there are few examples of FOSS coops right now and I am not aware of any written material around this topic, so if anyone has something to share, please feel free.
I belive gathering material and getting to publish something as a group would be a great way to reinforce our commmunity spirit as well as a way to stay true to our core value of promoting cooperatives.
Seems like a reasonable idea but I don't think I have the knowledge of the space to really judge or to help right now, so I'm abstaining.
I'm a bit leery about doing this when social.coop is still in its formative stage, but I'd love to see more cooperatively-owned FOSS projects.
If done tactfully, it could be a interesting undertaking? Although it seems like a sizable one. And it doesn't feel like we have the coop thing quite sorted out sustainably ourselves yet.
As a general proposal, something like a vision statement. "If Mastodon were a platform coop, what might that look like?"
I reckon this could be an interesting conduit through which to channel more focused discussion and produce some complete, formalised proposal/vision/manifesto. I expect it would be worthwhile as a process (even if Gargron never reads it!)
Is there a specific example document/organization we agree would be a model for this in software? My abstain is definitely encouragement to all who have specifics in mind to draft something for discussion, I just don't know myself.
I don't know enough about this to make an informed decision.
This is an interesting idea but I feel we are still finding our way ourselves and so have other things we should be focusing our energies on. If we do go ahead, I think our proposal should be solid in its own right, not a part of ForkOff as such.
All power to anyone up for getting a proposal going.
I don't think this is something that needs the permission of social.coop at this stage - once there's a proposal in place, perhaps the group can endorse it then.
Looking forward to reviewing it!
All power to anyone up for getting a proposal going.
I don't think this is something that needs the permission of social.coop at this stage.
I connect with @matthewcropp/s observation re: focus & neil re: a more general FOSS doc better use of time.
Changing my vote from Abstain to Agree. I think the development of a model mastodon development co-op structure to be shared would be useful. Folks could take or leave it, but it would also serve to advance s.c's capacity, I think...
The whole forkoff thing is full of awful, abusive people. Their constant flaming and "shaming" are making my experience of Mastodon worse than Twitter ever was. If I had to actually work with them as part of SC, I'd probably have to move server.
My (uninformed mostly gut) feeling about #forkoff is negative, but in general I think cooperative structures should be considered wherever possible so I'm not opposed either
I see social.coop wildly expanding its engagement in more and more shiny things that come along before we've even got our technical and code-of-conduct house in order. This is activity creep IMO.
After reading a lot of what's being said by people active in #ForkOff / #ForkOffTogether, and considering the current state of social.coop itself (downtime, software now several revisions out of date), I do not think this is a good use of our energy.
I think being able to maintain the server consistently stable and running a recent version of Mastodon would be a great first step on this path.
TruFax
@matthewcropp . . . 'maintaining our own fork that is optimized for democratically-governed fediverse instances' . . . a commons to be skilfully conceptualised and curated and stewarded with rigour and determination (much labour, some kit, some ££, and not a little legal/licence stuff?).
But not (?) a means of livelihood? Perhaps yes, this too? #Mastodon does this for @Gargon? But for most stakeholders, no? Careful balancing of multi-stakeholder coop form/governance.
Totally with you on this one: if we ever get to fork our version of Mastodon (whether this is a good idea is still to be seen) it should definitely offer a livelihood to those working on it. It can't be stressed enough how important it is for the FOSS community as a whole that we make it clear that the multi-stakeholder cooperative model we''re debating here is meant to replace the current donation model and the unsteady and volatile income stream tied to it.
A terrific and significant thread this @michelekipiel thanks. Is it sufficiently complex now that it would benefit from a bit of judicious editorial forking to make it more usable for the thread-purpose? Or a contents list in the context field? . . .coupled with a few editorial comments aggregating links to sub-threads? The latter we can contribute to. The former are open only to you.
Maybe run a poll on what the sub-threads seem to be? But maybe, wait until the dust of #ForkOff is settling a bit?
@mikeh8
Is it sufficiently complex now that it would benefit from a bit of judicious editorial forking
One thing that often helps with long-running Loomio threads is for a volunteer to edit the context box at the top, to summarize the discussion so far. That way, anyone arriving in the thread for the first time can get up to speed without reading a huge wall of text ;)
Could someone do that with this thread perhaps?
In most Loomio groups I've been part of any group member can edit a context box in a thread in that group. Seems that in this thread only @michelekipiel can edit the context box. Hmm. Is this a group level setting or something you set Michele?
No idea... I don't recall changing any setting when first opening the thread. I'll double check and let you know!
This is the kind of editorial thing I generally like to do. But right now I'm up to my ears, so am not open to this helpful work on this significant thread at this time. Sad to say. Any takers?
From the POV of an outside observer from GNU Social land (only recently moved to a Mastodon instance), a lot of the current conflict in the Mastodon community seems to derive from three things;
1) As @saper pointed out in the governance thread on Discourse, some confusion about which decisions only affect Mastodon.social (the flagship instance), vs which affect Mastodon (the software/ network of instances), vs. which affect the fediverse (the meta-network of all instances of all the social apps that can inter-operate)
2) Two overlapping but different sets of design goals for the UI
3) Two very different and conflicting sets of expectations about how to govern and manage the software development process
Issue #1 could be mitigated by user education, based on clear, user-friendly documentation explaining the boundaries between each layer. Issue #2 could be solved for instances that don’t like @Gargron’s UI design choices, by swapping out the vanilla Mastodon web client for something like Pinafore or Halcyon.
But I think the deepest and most difficult problem here is #3, and this one has no technical solution, because it’s a social problem, not a technical problem. There was an attempt to solve this problem by having @maloki employed as a Community Manager, but this doesn’t seem to have solved it. I agree with Maloki that the only solution that will allow everyone to get their needs met is a fork; a new project with its own name, identity, code repo(s), documentation, and community processes.
I've posed some discussion questions for the would-be forkers here:
https://discourse.joinmastodon.org/t/mastodon-project-governance/215/41?u=strypey
the only solution that will allow everyone to get their needs met is a fork; a new project with its own name, identity, code repo(s), documentation, and community processes
Mastodon is already borderline impossible to get for the layman as it is, let's not make things worse. I'm not against specific groups forking their own version to serve their peculiar needs, I'm against spreading the idea that fragmentation is the only viable solution.
"If we consider the OECD findings on computer literacy accurate, Mastodon is inaccessible to all but maybe 25% of the population. It has a high social friction coefficient and a disturbingly exponential technical friction coefficient."
(Quote from: https://hackernoon.com/my-journey-into-mastodon-three-ish-days-of-overcoming-friction-d8d80285c23c )
I responded to this by email, but the reply seems to have got stuck in #TheClacks ;) TL;DR a) the fork is a happening whether we approve or not (eg see: https://elekk.xyz/@maloki/100184064777891255) b) I expect Gargon will be relieved to see most of these people go. c) I think this is all a distraction from building coops around hosting and improved #UX (an area where user-driven design can help a lot), but if you want to make a proposal I suspect Maloki's crew will be much more welcoming of governance input than Gagron
think this is all a distraction from building coops around hosting and improved #UX
Agreed. The UX of Mastodon as a whole (ie. everything from understanding what federation is, to picking an instance, to finding people etc...) is frankly sub-par compared to corporate social media.
This thread is getting a bit tangled to follow! @strypey says "this is all a distraction". But if this is the question of taking a stake in a Mastodon development fork, and instituting a coop to govern this, then I would say that this is very much about creating the conditions for developing the Mastodon UX, through user-driven design as Strypey advocates. And as @michelekipiel says, the Mastodon UX sure as hell does need improving!
A question to those who are more technically familiar with the app . . . do you believe that the architecture of Mastodon is open to a very much redesigned UX? Strypey has been wowed by his new UX of the Pinafore skin for Mastodon - and I do think that it is cleaner, which is a step up. But still a bit nerdy, requiring a lot of tech- and fediverse-literacy, and not very accommodating to folks like me who don't sit all day in front of a screenful of dev tools and internet feeds, but just want to 'see' a community's traffic flowing by in a filterable, attributable, trackable, searchable, non-intrusive, beautiful way. If the Mastodon architecture can be framed that way, great, let's take a stake and build a coop to build the UX.
I'm very impressed by the way that social.coop folks talk carefully and collaboratively together. And it would be great to have an app/UX that supported conversation comfortably in these kinds of considerate and diverse and diversifying and purposeful community.
Not a distraction at all then? Rather, a great gift to humankind and a great leap forward in the history of internet cooperation and literacy? If there's something clunky in the underlying architecture of Mastodon, which means it always will feel nerdy - forget it. But maybe it's the fediverse that's nerdy, in which case the solution is to develop the UX that welcomes and makes comfortable and inspires a different user community, who are not nerds (all the time! self included)? And not the undisciplined ego-blasters who trip-out in commercial social media and in the widest Mastodon public feed ;-) Am I really saying 'Build it, and they will come'? Hmmnn not sure about that. But as a designer and a cooperator, I do have faith that a lovely tool will find a community of skilful loving users.
Based on my insight as a developer who haunts the Mastodon github on and off and has several pet issues ... yes, it's very very possible to use Mastodon with presentation layer (like Pinafore, or any number of mobile apps) that isn't the same as the official mainline UI. I do probably more than 90% of my activity in the fediverse on my phone, in part because I've moved to mobile for a lot of my interaction, and in part because I don't like the mainline UI. The software is set up such that it's not that difficult to put different front ends on it.
As for the rest of the conversation... I don't think contributing to #ForkOff in the near future is a good idea for social.coop. There is a great deal of nastiness involved, and the entire thing exists as someone else said due to a social problem, not a technical one, and further, it's not a social problem that the co-op model will necessarily go a long way to solve (in my opinion anyway).
I strongly agree that the fediverse could benefit from better UX, but I think a particular UI to suit the needs of co-op modeled instances should be its own concept/project completely separate from #ForkOff.
There are two things tangled together in this thread as I see it. One is the broader issue/opportunity/potential of the applicability of the cooperative business model as an effective sustainable solution to the challenges of running successful FOSS projects. The title talks about developing a white paper as a start point to move that on, and I'd support that approach.
The second is the specific opportunity(?) presented by the current debate within the Mastodon project. I've not got involved in the guts of that debate, but it looks/looked pretty fraught, so whether there is actually a real solid opportunity there or not I don't know. I'll leave others to assess that and act accordingly.
Other possibilities/opportunities. The Drutopia project, for example (don't know it that's already been mentioned in this thread) which describes itself as a 'software cooperative', might provide a better place to learn, develop and refine the thinking?
@mikeh8 @michelekipiel
I've used a cafe metaphor to explain how I see the situation. It got long (who, me?), and I thought it might be of more general interest, so I blogged it:
https://www.coactivate.org/projects/disintermedia/blog/2018/06/12/from-digital-cages-to-cooperative-digital-cafes/
TL;DR the distraction I meant was the ongoing Mastodon drama, something I think the fork is the most likely way to resolve. Yes, I see #ForkOffTogether as on opportunity to bring coop governance to a new fediverse project, go for it. But social.coop has many software options either way.
I agree with Muninn that working on a cooperative model/concept/project for the larger Mastodon (Fediverse) in which SC resides is and should be separate from the current #ForkOff activity.
That being said I do believe that the lack of (democratic or other) representation into main line of Masto dev nor a verifiable process to air grievances by users has contributed to and exacerbated the current and past social ills of the community at large and will continue to do so in any community/fork that fails to address that.
I wish we could dis-entangle this idea - posted 3 months ago now as I write this - from #ForkOff. There are people behaving quite unpleasantly under that banner at present.
Perhaps we could make a separate thread, and send a couple representatives of our community to their meeting once they get the time set up and everything, and then discuss any potential for working with the #ForkOff folks after their initial meeting? Hopefully I'm not just adding more noise, but this thread is already pretty long, some other people were talking above about how it's hard to get into.
Hell, maybe two separate threads - a Part 2 on this one, and a ForkOff-specific thread, and lock this one?? Just throwing ideas out there to keep the discussion(s) focused..
I wish we could too. Even though it was an accelerant and maybe an opportunity to catch the attention of some dissatisfied users, admins, and devs the label is more of a distraction. possible @michelekipiel could get rid of the ForkOff language in the Proposal but I think it's now colored the thread a fair bit. Given the split of support and concerns of diversion away from things that critically need to do get done for SC alone there is a good chance this may be split off from SC activities for those like myself and Michele (or any others interested) who might want to explore deeper into a Federated Mastodon Coop model. Once there is something solid it could be resubmitted back to SC for feedback, etc.
Hi,
thanks for asking the question. I believe the "ForkOff" label in the poll is being misinterpreted a fair bit. I didn't mean it as a declaration of allegiance, so to say (ie. I'm not taking sides here), but rather as a keyword to better ground the poll in a given context (ie. the whole situation that erupted around the #ForkOff hashtag).
I am by no means willing to tie this thread to the fortunes, or lack thereof, of the ForkOff group, as the matters at hand are MUCH more important than the mere squabble of a few disgruntled users.
I'll remove the label at once to avoid further confusion.
Thank you and sorry for the inconvenience.
There are people behaving quite unpleasantly under that banner at present.
... and since this appears to be their typical modus operandi, if you read some of the Mastodon GH issues, this is precisely why I suspect Gargron will be thrilled to see them go. Sadly, a lot of their ill-mannered noise included demands for "democratic governance" (reading between the lines, systems they could more easily game to put themselves in charge of the active developers), so I suspect it will be a while before Gargron won't be re-traumatized by any proposal to democratize Mastodon dev.
On the #forkoff, it has raised a larger question for me around whether we should have a long-term goal of maintaining our own fork that is optimized for democratically-governed fediverse instances?