Florence

There's been a lot of pressure for us to work on the code. Even though it's something we do want to do as well, we realized quite soon that we started getting lost in trying to get releases out, instead of working on important documentation, like the Code of Conduct, and our Vision and Mission statements. Today's blog post is going to cover how we completed our Code of Conduct, and where we're going next.

Code of Conduct

As we baby-step our way forward we've now finally decided on a first version of our Code of Conduct. In it, we incorporated some old materials (such as the first Survey for #ForkOff), the later CoC related survey, and subsequent discussions from both the Discord server (now deprecated) and Mattermost/Chat (current mode of synchronous communication). On the Wiki we have some more details on what led us to the CoC in it's current form, like Guiding Principles and Goals of the document.

Why is it a first version? This is always going to be under revisement, and updated as necessary. This CoC has actually been updated since we started writing this blog post, and that's why it took a while longer. Moving forward it's important to acknowledge that we change and evolve, and learn new things with time. While there may be things we've missed, we tried to cover our bases the best we could. We're hoping that people who agree with this CoC also will agree with the general mission of Florence moving forward.

Thanks for the help

The additional updates made to this CoC were made with the help of @guerrillarain@eldritch.cafe, @error_1202@mspsocial.net and @nev@social.coop. We also want to thank everyone who helped out all the way back in the beginning by transferring the conversation from the discord and the survey results to the wiki. And of course our team who've been working to put it together.

Roadmap—What is coming next?

We've already touched upon that we want to complete a few things before working on releases. The next thing on that list is the Vision for Florence as an organization, and the Mission statement for the #Mastodon Fork under #Florence.

Development

After that is done we can finally move on to deciding on how we will accept PRs and what kind of things will go into Florence. It's tempting to accept everything or always think of Florence when PRs are rejected from Mastodon, but we do want to have our own goals, and move towards them. That said, when we reject a PR, we want it to be crystal clear why we're doing it. One of the reasons we want the Vision and Mission statements completed before this step, is that we want to agree on what that goal is, so it becomes as clear as possible to both team members and onlookers why we're accepting certain code and not other.

With this, we need to figure out how to onboard the changes people have already made, as well as making Florence Masto on par with Mastodon 3.0. This will require some extra help from people familiar with the code. Some of you have waited for this, to be able to contribute with coding, so I hope to see you soon. Further down you can see how to join in for contributions.

Crowdfunding

While we're figuring all that out, we will also start our fund-raising. One thing we are looking for is people to match donations for our crowdfunding campaign, so people's donations turn into a little bit more extra. We're still figuring out the details for this, but if you're interested in helping out with this you can reach out to maloki via the fediverse. Hopefully this will help us get a good start for supporting our active team, and future developers, translators, and other contributors.

Want to contribute or just stay up to date?

Currently you can join the chat over on our Mattermost server. And if you want to join our semi-weekly meetings for Governance and the work we're doing there, let us know in the chat. Otherwise you're welcome to join our works-sessions on the other week (as mentioned in this meeting note).

Next meeting is the 17th of November at 16 UTC. If you're not able to attend, but want to attend a later meeting, please get in touch with maloki and let her know what times work better for you.

You can always stay up to date on the Wiki for weekly meetings, or follow these blog posts here, via email or from most ActivityPub compatible platform by following us here!

You can also follow the roadmap and what we're working on via this Project on Github.

Thank you for reading, and your continued support.