Community Governance Proposal

The current working stage is referred to as "Stage 1".

This document is not intended to explicity show work workflow; it is an overreaching proposal for how the community can work together to emerge into a much more democratic, community-driven project.

For specific Workflow-specific topics, check Workflow.

The goal of this initiative is to turn Diaspora into the fully community-centric project that it was intended to be.

Stage 0

Stage 0 is largely a preparation stage. A number of things have been done to help facilitate movement into Stage 1.

• The opening of our Pivotal Tracker.
• JoinDiaspora.com has a new sign-in page to signify that there are other pods out there, and points to useful resources.
• We released a simple deployer tool called Provisioner, which spins up a Diaspora instance on top of the Heroku service. We would like to improve this further, but this allows for a simple one-click installation of Diaspora on Heroku.

Stage 1

The logical next step is to gear up on our documentation. Our docs could cover different tips on configuration, for example. We need to get better docs that fullfill the needs of Developers and Podmins.

• Surveys will be given to those that run their own pods over problems they've had in the past, what configurations they have, etc.
• Needs will be put into the Community Documentation Team, which tends over the wiki to help improve it.
• New developers will be pointed to specific pieces of the docs to help directly answer their questions, and better serve their needs.
• A new workflow will be established to make it easier for Podmins to report their problems to the community, along with updating docs and better reporting of bugs.

Stage 2

Stage 2 is where we begin to get our hands dirty.

• Start up Bug Mash Monday again. The point of BMM is to provide some low-hanging fruit to beginners that want to learn more about working with D*.
• Developers will be encouraged to work with one another on features in teams. Features will be discussed openly on Diaspora-Dev, and community members are welcome to join a team and offer whatever help they can.
• When a developer makes an announcement to begin work on a new feature, their announcement will be shared out through DiasporaHQ.
• Community devs will be able to work on whatever they want to, so long as they keep in mind the needs of the other teams. Communication between these teams is absolutely crucial.