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.

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.