Met with @nothingismagick today; summary

[Beanow]

Today I met up with @nothingismagick for the first time, as he was in the area. Here's a summary of things we talked about.

Organizational concerns

A couple of issues that can be improved came up;

• Should we be on GitHub?
• Financial transparency. Domain sponsored? #75
• Missing access for the website and build pipelines. Automate github pages build #79 and DNS

For the short term, we had the idea of creating a new (@next) preview URL.
A great long term solution would be to transition SFOSC to a foundation.

New preview URL

We have seen that there is a great deal of new and useful content that has not yet been published in the front-facing website. We considered the opportunity to make a @next version in order to solicit feedback before the content gets "published" (and to temporarily sidestep the current permissions issues faced by the maintainer team in Adam's absence).

Idea to transition SFOSC to a foundation

As we talked about governance and legal risks, we concluded it would make sense to move SFOSC itself to a foundation sooner rather than later. The repositories host a wealth of great discussions already that would benefit from stronger guarantees it will be for and by the community.

But also when SFOSC offers suggestions / models and they get adopted, it could be reason for businesses (that don't benefit as much) to claim damages. Should that happen, it would be really important for a foundation to offer protection and support here.

One viable approach is to be adopted by an existing Foundation and use their status and resources while SFOSC ramps up. For example through the https://commonsconservancy.org/how/ program.

Once set up, it would also open up new possible solutions to questions like, should we be on GitHub? As self-hosted infrastructure makes more sense when we're able to handle donations / grants / sponsorships.

Discord / chat server

Instant messaging seems really useful for bouncing ideas and coordinating work in real-time.
It wouldn't replace github communication but offer an additional place to chat with the community.

Discord seems like a good option. Except, it's VC backed and proprietary. So we're also thinking what foss options would offer a similar experience.

The SFOSC wizard

In the issues #87, #84 and #6 the idea of wizards and questionaires came up.

They seem to be roughly the same idea, but on a few different areas:

• What your community intentions and/or ethics are (Source Available Licenses #87, Greater Good Affirmation?)
• How you ensure work is really for the benefit of the community (Sustainability Requirements #84, Social Contracts #6)
• And how you're planning to create sustainable positive feedback loops (Sustainability Requirements #84, Social Contracts #6)

An interesting idea could be to create this into one mix-and-match wizard, to let projects choose from several flavors in those areas, in a similar way to Creative Commons and Polyform, for each of those areas.

Question: Would it be useful to track organizations that have completed the wizard?

Inviting comments from parties we mention

Lots of examples are named in discussions on SFOSC. Things we like and got inspired by, things that could be better. In the interest of great, nuanced discussions as well as fairness. We agreed it would be very useful to actively invite them for comments, and make sure there's options for recourse in case they have a serious problem with any of the content.

In the case of the Social Purpose Corporation, we reached out to Kyle Rankin from Purism / Librem / Pureos to give a more sober treatment of the new business model, which he did here: #76
And in the past had great disucssions with Jeremy Stanley and Thierry Carrez to talk about the OpenStack Project and OpenStack Foundation governance models #47

SFOSC Awesome & Readsome

To give #28 recomended reading and related work a place, using the awesome-sfosc idea could be a great way to share great work and makes for a good first PR at the same time.

[Beanow]

Since these were more minutes of what we discussed, there's no real follow op for this issue and it can be closed for the archives. 📁 I'll create a few issues for ideas we haven't picked up elsewhere yet.