Let’s try to reverse plan based on the available workforce then. With my current duties (mostly coding), I can spare at most one day per week (8 hours) on this particular topic. If the goal is to have a webinar around mid-january, that’s a total of six weeks, i.e. six days of work. In addition you’re available for guidance and usually responsive within 24/48h. It will probably take you around 30 to provide guidance for 8 hours of work (steering the effort in the right direction, in case it does not go in the right direction). Noone else volunteered so far so, let’s assume that’s there is. Going back to your bullet list,
- “Sell” the vision of forgefriends. Why people should be rocking back and forth on their seat in excitement (16h to 24h to articulate a vision that can be “sold”, with a pitch, a blog post, etc. there is a lot of material but, as you pointed out, it is less than appealing, even though it is sensible. Someone with marketing skills would maybe do that quicker but if I’m to do it, this is going to be a lot of trial and error)
- Approach the Gitea team, the full team and seriously ask the questions (16h at least because they are all busy. I know who they are and some of them know who I am, there is no need for introductions. But getting them to focus on that topic instead of the many other topics they have in mind is a difficult challenge. The questions are good, the problem is to get a thought out answer):
- How do you see the importance of the vision? And elaborate it further.
- How committed are you to bring all this about in best ways possible?
- How do we move forward so that we can benefit off each other’s strengths?
- And Codeberg can play a role here too. I see them more as the people-oriented organization whereas Gitea are the ‘tech center’ (24h at least because I don’t know people at codeberg. And before approaching them, time must be spent to figure out how they can play a role in pushing federation forward).
- Turn “forge friends” into a real concept and a campaign that is used to rally the community, attract people (months of work, it won’t fit, but it’s a good direction).
- Make it exciting, accessible, attractive to join, facilitate onboarding, etc.
- And ask Gitea and Codeberg if they want to be intricate part of forgefriends in this construct.
It looks like the most sensible way would be to tackle the “Sell” the vision of forgefriends part. I’m very uncomfortable doing that, as you very well know. It is obviously necessary. And also obviously not my area of expertise. The efforts I’ve done so far in this direction are, to put it mildly, amateurish and ineffective. I will keep at it but I have to ask myself: why would I do better in the future than I did in the past?
This is more of a brain dump than anything. Or maybe I’m procrastinating. In any case I’ll decide how to spend these six days of work before the end of the week. The worst that can happen is that it will be a meeting that does not attract many people but is informative and useful anyways.