I don’t actually know what a thunderclap is in this context, but I think it’s best to stick to ‘slowly growing, slowly developing, quietly publicising’.
As has been said before, what diaspora doesn’t need is a huge influx of new users. It needs if anything new developers, and it’s been wonderful over the past few months to see the team of developers growing and the number of pull requests and fixes increasing.
Making a really big noise to get some publicity risks overselling ourselves. As we don’t have to achieve certain numbers of users by certain dates to satisfy shareholders, let’s dare to be different and just say plainly what’s been happening: slow building with rock-solid testing to achieve the end goal of a fantastic, privacy-aware decentralised social web. We can put out a call for new developers to join the team as well, as this would be a big help to everyone, I’m sure.
Have a look at the draft press release I’ve linked below. It’s really rough, and needs a lot of work from you guys to make it ready for release. Look forward to seeing what you do with it.
I’m thinking to do an announcement about the upcoming anniversary via the dHQ account. Asking for artwork was part of this, but I forgot to mention the anniversary! Is there anything particular you think I should say in this post?
@goob I agree we don’t want nor need to suddenly increase the number of users. What we need is developers (and podmins). But the advertising, the buzz, is not about having directly more people involved. It’s about changing the reputation of the project. For those who don’t use it like for those who do, diaspora is a dead project. Because many hopes appeared and were deceived, because founders quit, because nobody communicated, because code didn’t change during almost one year (april 2012 to april 2013). We need to show that now, there is people working on it, there is believers, there is, more than never before, a need of a privacy respectful social network. This is what I want to say the 27th of August. This is what I want every free software people to know. Being involved is another step. Using it is another step. But just to know that diaspora* is alive and become better everyday is the step we have to do right now.
@goob about your draft, I don’t think this is what we need: media wants to write their own article, it’s their job to summarize the history of the project and make beautiful sentences. What we need to send to them is raw information they’ll be able to use: key points, key features, key people, and key numbers.
We need to prove that the project is living, and nothing is better than numbers to prove. We can talk about the number of line of code modified / added, the number of people who contributed, an estimation of the number of users, and each time, we can make the comparison with “last year” and “last three months” to see that the project is growing NOW. The graph and the pulse section of github are a gold mine.
But the advertising, the buzz, is not about having directly more people involved. It’s about changing the reputation of the project. For those who don’t use it like for those who do, diaspora is a dead project. Because many hopes appeared and were deceived, because founders quit, because nobody communicated, because code didn’t change during almost one year (april 2012 to april 2013). We need to show that now, there is people working on it, there is believers, there is, more than never before, a need of a privacy respectful social network. This is what I want to say the 27th of August. This is what I want every free software people to know.
@flaburgan this is very well said. I think things have been going so well over the past year that I’d more or less forgotten just how bad things were for so long before that. You’re right, we need to say ‘Look where we were a year ago. Now look where we are today!’
Thanks for that paragraph, that conveys the passion we should convey to the outside world.
About the press release, I look forward to your edits!
What email address could we send it out from? Any possibility of creating an info@diasporafoundation.org address for this kind of use? Who would monitor it?
Maybe we could also add addresses to send to in format “Blog - Address - email” to the doc under the email - and then someone sends them out once we decide to go ahead?
Yes, I think so. It would be great if we had a diasporadfoundation.org email address, but otherwise if Sean and Fla are happy to use one of their own email addresses, that would be fine - we are after all a decentralised project, with no central hub other than a virtual one.
Would either @jonnehass or @florianstaudacher be happy to field press enquiries in German? No pressure, I’m just wondering if we can add that language to our press coverage, as there is a large German-speaking community on diaspora.
I’m not sure whether the separate ‘press release’ doc I drafted is even necessary. This email sort of covers it all. We could send the email again as a press release on 26 Aug, I guess.
@flaburgan We also need to get the blog up and running, as the Diaspora Foundation blog will be part of the site’s application, rather than hosted separately on a Wordpress instance. Last I checked, @dennisschubert and @jonnehass had been getting some development work done on the project site here and there. Is it possible that we could get the blog set up before the 27th?
I’d really like to acknowledge the roles of Sean, Jonne and Florian somehow, as I don’t think the project would be anywhere near as healthy today as it is had they not been doing the work they have as a sort of ad hoc project hub. And without the open way they’ve worked, I’m not sure we’d currently have so many contributors, a number which seems to be growing all the time.
Well, other people might have stepped in to steer the project had they not been around, of course, but those three have been at the helm during the past year, and it would be good to acknowledge this at the anniversary. (Apologies if I’ve missed anyone central.)
@goob To be fair though, we’d have to give credit where credit is due. The project really wouldn’t be where it is without all of the community developers. We’ve had a lot of really great developments and features come in from people that just wanted to scratch an itch.
