I have a few thoughts about how I see the community managers role at this stage of the project. With some feedback, I can form this into a plan.
There are currently 3 projects funded around forge federation. I think that it makes sense that the Community Manager effort should be shared between all 3 projects as well as overall forge federation. I partly see this as an effort to help the developers to be able to stay focused on their work.
The common group is forge friends. But perhaps Forg.es is the better one for this. We’re still in flux at the moment, so this can wait until the codename fork is decided and announced.
As a strategy we need to weave in public.
This means not just reporting on our website, but establishing outposts on other social media platforms including twitter (If it isn’t burned down), LinkedIn. To be clear I’m not advocating for the individual projects to do this. On the other hand, as NGI grantees we want some presence. So perhaps cross posting from mastodon to twitter could be used. But I expect more interactions to happen on the fediverse. With the other outposts posting kept to a minimum, so it could be done manually.
The reason for this isn’t just to reach developers. We need to demonstrate to the EU and other potential funds for the public good that we are a great example for a project to invest in for the common good.
We should also consider the possible application for heptapod/gitlab federation. If we get that funded, we have the potential to make a huge difference to several FOSS forges. (Framagit, Debian). Outreach also includes seeing who else we can collaborate with.
Long term, I’d like for the projects to be Reproducible. My thinking is cooperation to help each other rise. So finding a way to enable our projects to easily be installable makes sense. We can also aim for the Summer of Nix as a chance to get someone funded for that. We weave our community and reach out to other initiatives.
We establish a common identity for the outposts.
When we have something to report we can create a standard post to go to the networks. But the main focus is keeping in touch with the fediverse.
I would also advise that as part of the projects for this initial stage of funding it would be good to credit how it was funded in the README. By promoting the funding we show that we are a good option for future rounds. This helps to make @dachary life easier when applying for additional funding. Especially if we can improve forge federation by enabling applications for developers to work on it. This helps to grow our community.
One of the strengths the group is demonstrating at the moment is commonality of purpose. We are cooperating and in harmony, so our project accounts in public need to stay that way as well.
Community Management is also about well being, so I do expect to help out with this.
Moderation in the chats. forum and also the forges. We also need to pay attention in the fediverse as well.
In terms of improving diversity, the part of the budget in the workplan should go towards filling any shortfall that NGI ENTRUST and NGI Zero Review cannot give us. So perhaps for the monthly meetings we could pay someone to do the transcripts for our meetings. If we do any instructional videos we can pay for those to be subtitled as well. Some of the Diversity budget should also be towards internationalization. The other reason for doing this is to start recruiting other people to look after community as well.
In the short term.
Once we know what codename.fork is we need to:
Establish accounts.
Post announcements and introductions
Once we have the MOU finalised for codename.fork, F3 and Vervis do an initial announcement thanking NGI (fund)
Longer term:
Publish monthly reports and the meetings. Ideally with subtitles etc. Again some translations for those as well would be good. So there are some questions to be asked of NLNet specifically about support from this. Will we get some help for this from Entrust or NGI Zero review.
Community Management : wellbeing, outreach etc.