Florence April Update

Last Friday (12 Apr 2019, 8pm UTC) the “Florence Kick-off Crew”, had a meeting about what steps we could accomplish this week. See meeting notes here. As we mentioned when we brought ForkTogether back to life as Florence in January, we’ve gone back to a smaller core group to start things off, to make decisions and move things along. We’ve (as mentioned here) also been taking into account all old conversations and discussions as we make our decisions. Now the goal is to get some more shared communications platforms up, which brings us to today’s update. The team has changed a bit in the past month.

Kick-off Crew

Currently we have maloki and mecaka as project managers (we’ll introduce that further in the next section) working together with 1011X, jhaye and lightdark. PaulFerence took their leave a while back, and Satsuma has been out of commission due to health, but is starting to come back.

We also have some people assigned to teams which we’ll be working with getting up and running as the communications platforms are up. These teams will start out with Governance (which is basically this kick-off team), Development and Infrastructure. Then we’ll add on with more teams as we keep progressing. We hope to introduce those teams when we have something to show. If you’re interested in joining any of these teams do not hesitate to contact myself or mecaka.

Project management

In light of maloki’s health situation, @mecaka@elekk.xyz will be helping maloki with project management tasks and anything else she can, hopefully helping keep the ball rolling after quite a few hiccups. Her main focus this week has been to catch up on the various on-goings from the last couple of months, and get orientated as a part of the kick-off crew. She's been doing a lot of reading, on the Discord server, the blog posts, maloki's posts on the Fediverse, and so on, to get there. And, incidentally she helped us write this post together with maloki.

Communication

We’ve had ligthdark and woozle work together to get Mattermost up and running, which will be replacing Discord, and this will be where the real work will begin, and the teams start working together more closely. This has been one of the thresholds for a while, but we’re hoping that when this is up it will help facilitate some conversations.

If you want to join the conversation, you can do so through this invite, just be aware that the verification email may take a moment to send.

Infrastructure

As we are slowly preparing our own infrastructure, we've started with a few simple links and redirects. So, you can now reach the ForkTogether/Florence Wiki via wiki.florencesoc.org and the Mattermost at chat.florencesoc.org (but sign up with previous link first).

As you can tell, we’re trying to work around achievable and attainable goals on a fairly slow pace at the moment, but as the communication infrastructure gets up, we will be kicking off the development team and infrastructure team a bit more. Along with some other teams like translation, wiki, and outreach.

If you want to stay up to date you can follow the #Florence hashtag on the fediverse, or this blog via @florence@write.as.

Our next meeting is set for 22 April 2019, 8pm UTC. And we’ll keep working and keep trying to be transparent in our processes and progress. We want to keep this momentum going, and get to the point where we can properly involve everyone who wants to be involved, at the level they want to be involved.