Yes, indeed.
The broader visionary framework serves to inspire people to commit themselves, increasing the likelyhood they do so, when they see a path of potential and opportunities to jump in and contribute. Like landscaping a big garden and picturing it first. Ideally I want that landscape to offer a multitude of points where people can jump in, to shape their own ideas. Invariably when they do so, cross-pollination starts to happen and they will be helpers to your cause as well.
Btw, it is not just planting seeds and “let them grow on their own”. The fact that they are there means that we’re able to draw attention to them and say “Look, what we intend to become. You can be part of this”. And I myself - while forgefriends is not my primary project - will give bits of water and nourishment whenever I encounter something that relates to them.
As we discussed on Matrix yesterday, the Forgefriends FSDL will not be an empty space. You are already coding interop-related things and FSDL is where the specification of that can mature. Specification an activity that occurs side-by-side and in parallel to coding. It will help as a assurance of your “Interoperability” requirement to the code project.
“Forge friends”, the ongoing community effort to bring full interoperability to code forges, will need to address standardization in a set of specifications that go well beyond what current standards (AP and DVCS) provide out-of-the-box. They will subsets of these and in particular ways and specific business rules to take into account.
I like the idea of an incubator. Currently there’s already the #discussions:ideas category that serves a similar purpose. But “incubator” is more actionable. Conveys that we want people to experiment.
Yet, I still want to explore having a Forgefriends FSDL as one of the central pillars of the whole concept of “forge friends”. To me it makes a lot of sense if all projects in the forgefriends ecosystem contributed their interop specification to a set of maturing standards.