Community anniversary

Communication and Outreach
1

In one month (the 27th of August to be exact), the project will be run by the community for one year. I think it could be great to use this date to relaunch communication. At the moment, most articles in the web say bad news about diaspora: project dead, nothing new for years, abandoned by founders… Vice did a big and really complete article one year ago, it would be cool to re-contact them to update it to have a happier end.

If we could have the diasporafoundation.org website finished and polished, and a big new feature like “diaspora federation is available as a ruby gem, talk with diaspora directly with your application” by the end of August, it would be awesome.

We could make an announcement on the blog with a nice image, I’m sure this will be token by the whole media.

So, we need to:

  • Polish and complete the diasporafoundation website
  • Finish, package and test the federation gem (it doesn’t need to be integrated to diaspora at the moment)
  • Prepare an announcement
  • Make nice images to do the buzz
  • Make a list of media we should contact

I think we should involved the diaspora* community: there is a lot of artists and web dev on diaspora we can contact to help us, at least with the images and maybe with the website.

We could post a message with diasporaHQ: “In one month, it’s the first anniversary of the community run diaspora, we want to do the buzz, so every artist here, express yourself about it, make images, gifs, movies, everything you want, and prepare yourself to spread the word the 27th of August! We especially need a “banner” like to go with the official announcement. Post your proposition here and we will pick one!”

What do you think guys, are you ready to make this happens before the 27th of August?

Update

See email and list of media here: http://piratepad.net/IOOTIYz2vi

German version here: http://pad.spored.de/p/Community_Geburtstag_-_Presse

Note: This discussion was imported from Loomio. Click here to view the original discussion.

2

Great idea! I have doubts that the federation gem will be ready by then - it involves a lot of refactoring inside D* as well. But even if we just get the foundation website polished would be awesome - I don’t think we need a big feature rollout - those happen when code is ready for release anyway.

I’d be happy to do some stuff on the website, should we have an IRC meeting relating this or could someone post the status?

3

@jasonrobinson the important point in the gem (for public announcement) is to allow other application to talk to diaspora*. For the user of the network, they will see no difference when the gem will be integrated.

So this idea is, for the birthday, be able to say to the other devs who will read the news: “look, we changed, we are more open, you can now easily interact with diaspora*”, no matter we will already integrate the gem or not. Do you see my point?

4

@flaburgan yea I understand the point but what I am saying that from a dev perspective a month is a bit too soon to do a huge change like that. Diaspora lives and dies on federation. WHen the gem is ready - it has to be perfect.

5

So we are facing a challenge :stuck_out_tongue: will it be ready?

6

This is a great idea, Fla, and well done for spotting the anniversary coming up.

I think it would be too much time pressure to create a properly functioning gem for federation. Florian has only just started work on this. If we push to release for a certain date, we’d be in danger of doing a Microsoft - releasing bug-filled software for marketing purposes. Far better to work within our means.

I’d focus on the website, and particularly getting some good users guides prepared. Kevin Kleinman has given us permission to use his material from Diasporial as a basis, and I’d like to help work on these.

Really, rather than release anything for the anniversary itself, it would be good to promote what has changed/happened in Diaspora in the year since it became a community-run project. We’ve had several major releases and lot of other fixes and improvements.

We could try to create and agree a development road-map before then, so that we can say ‘this is where we hope to be by this time next year’.

We could also introduce MrZYX, Raven24 and some of the other core developers who have been steering the project over the past year, as long as they’re happy to be featured in this way, of course.

We can also promote the diasporafoundation.org site as the hub of the project, to start to move away from joindiaspora.com being ‘Diaspora’ in the public consciousness.

How does that sound?

7

Of course if the gem is ready and tested by then, that’s great and we can announce it. But I suspect it is too much of a stretch to try to achieve this.

8

Of course if the gem is ready and tested by then, that’s great and we can announce it. But I suspect it is too much of a stretch to try to achieve this.

@florianstaudacher we need your opinion here :wink:

I’d focus on the website, and particularly getting some good users guides prepared.

I really want to see resources available in a maximum of languages possible, so we need to think about that: where should we put it to be translatable? If it’s on diasporafoundation.org, we need to put i18n there. The other option is to put it directly inside diaspora: by doing that, we do not depend to one domain name…

9

Really loving this discussion, thank you @flaburgan for bringing up this idea!

So, I think we could expand this a bit, to give ourselves a few more details to highlight:

  • Packaging of D* for different distributions (Debian, for example, was awfully close to being finished last I heard)
  • A community developer planet, so that technical and non-technical users alike can see what things different people in the project are working on.

As for the announcement, perhaps we could also focus on the many releases we’ve gone through, new features, improvements, and leave off with our future goals? :slight_smile:

Finally, I do know a few media contacts that have interviewed me in the past about Diaspora, I’d be more than happy to reach out to them as well.

10

Packaging of D* for different distributions (Debian, for example, was awfully close to being finished last I heard)

@praveenarimbrathod hi! Any news about that?

A community developer planet, so that technical and non-technical users alike can see what things different people in the project are working on.

@seantilleycommunit I’m afraid we don’t have a big enough community to have a planet, it would probably be empty or blogposts will come to maximum 3 - 4 blogs => maybe we should simply have a blog with one account by user interested to post?

As for the announcement, perhaps we could also focus on the many releases we’ve gone through, new features, improvements, and leave off with our future goals? :slight_smile:

Of course! I trust you about the announcement :wink: Let’s create a draft on a wiki page.

Finally, I do know a few media contacts that have interviewed me in the past about Diaspora, I’d be more than happy to reach out to them as well.

Let’s make a list of who we want to contact. I edit the discussion context.

11

About the gem … we might have something usable until then, but it most probably won’t be stable in that time. (I’m away in August for a few days, so I won’t be able to work on it all the time).

12

English language media;

Some larger sites… Even one of these writing about the current situation would be good.

For those who have writers that can be “tipped” off a story or sent a request to write about Diaspora* we should send a message explaining the situation and proposing a look on the current situation. Of course those that are powered by guest writers we would need someone to actually write an article that we can submit.

I think we should at least formulate an email to send to any prospect sites asap and then we start with that - anyone just send to any sites they find, requesting some coverage of the situation.

Will try to help with this tomorrow.

13

One thing which would be great to do is to set up dedicated development groups to work on certain key and major aspects of the software. I can think of:

  • Federation
  • Communication protocol (Tent etc)
  • Account migration
  • Installation packaging
  • and I’m sure there are others.

If we can establish this before the anniversary, we can put out a call for developers to help with one of these areas. We’d ask developers to commit to devoting a few hours per week to this task, which would really help to get these key things moving.

(I realise there has been a lot of work done on certain elements, for example Debian packaging, but there’s a lot more to do on others.)

Actually, the Debian packaging group can be a model for how this can be done.

What we’d need to do now, I think, is:

  1. Establish which areas we need to set up dedicated groups for.
  2. Appoint a project co-ordinator for each one - someone who understands the issue fairly well and can co-ordinate the work of everyone in that group.

Once this is done, we can advertise for developers both in Diaspora itself and in any publicity we do for the anniversary.

14

@goob this topic is more about communication, to choose this group, I think organize ourselves is a better place to discuss. It’s a good idea to use the anniversary to find volunteers, but we don’t need to explain precisely which group they can join in the main message.

At the moment, we need to prepare the buzz itself, so a blogpost, and graphic stuff to make people to be able to easily spread the word.

15

@flaburgan I agree - I’m not suggesting to do all the organisation on this thread - but it’s useful to come up with ideas what we can do for the community anniversary (which is what this topic is) so that we can then organise (on other threads, perhaps) and communicate these ideas!

16

I’ve created a draft press release.

I know there’s a lot wrong with it, but I’ve never tried to write a press release before. At least it can be a launching point for your ideas to create something good.

Please dive in and attack it viciously with your editing scissors. Let’s get something really great together that we can send out to loads of media in advance of the anniversary!

@seantilleycommunit @jonnehass @florianstaudacher just to let you know I’ve mentioned you by name as you’ve been the three co-ordinators of the project and I think you deserve mention - please delete your name if you’re not happy with this. Also if I’ve missed anyone out whose been equally central to the project over the past year, please add them.

17

@goob (or maybe @seantilleycommunit ?) I saw the post from Dhq calling for art work. I created a wiki page about Branding (see the corresponding Loomio discussion), could you please include a link to it for the next message like that? (we need to improve it first, and precise a license for the images)

18

So, random idea: Making the most of a community anniversary, can we refer to August 27th as Diaspora Day?

We could make a bit of a push for some of our friends and colleagues to try out Diaspora on that day, and facilitate hooking up physical groups of people that all know each other in the acts of:

  • making new friends
  • finding new tags to follow
  • things to post about
  • how to use your privacy settings

We could also point out to more technical people how to set up pods of their own. There’s been a lot of work put into the Installation Guides. Judging on how Debian packaging is coming along, we could also officially update Debian-specific instructions, which for a lot of people might make installing and deploying D* pretty easy.

We could also have people hit up the #DiasporaDay hashtag on different socnets. New users could talk about taking part in it, and anyone could hit up the tag if they had a question or needed help.

19

Do you guys think we could do a thunderclap like for FirefoxOS or it’ll be ridiculous?

Btw, I do not really like Diaspora Day, I’d prefer put the community forward this famous day.

20

I don’t think we have enough weight for a thunderclap to actually be meaningful :stuck_out_tongue: But I guess it doesn’t hurt if someone wants to organize it.