Discussion and support

The central platform for community governance at Diaspora* is our group on Loomio. It is used for discussions on governance, process and technical topics, and it also functions as a voting tool, when decisions have to be made.

Note:

Currently, you can create an account on Loomio, only if you have been invited, since the software is still in closed beta. We're happy to invite anyone who is interested in participating. Read on, to find out how to join us there.

Getting an invite

Loomio is a new tool that is currently in invite only status. It is important to note that we give out invites to any community member who wants one, so this is not a restriction enforced by us but the restriction of Loomio itself. You can gain an invitation to Loomio by asking someone, either using How We Communicate or contacting almost any of the project members. One option is to use Diaspora* itself by posting a public message with the tag #diaspora.

Subgroups and Teams

Our Loomio group is further divided in to subgroups and teams. This ensures that not everybody has to follow all the discussion and voting topics, as many community members are only interested on some specific area. We also have non-Diaspora* folk for example discussing federated social networks as concept. Some subgroups serve as teams where the purpose of limiting membership to group is to keep decision making power to those who are members.

All groups are and should be public for transparency.

Documentation Team

The Documentation Team is dedicated to keeping our wiki updated, and at the same time, keep communication between podmins going. By sharing information and advice, we can improve the docs.

Feature Proposals

This group is specifically for proposing features, or modifying existing ones.

Developer Proposals

This group is not for feature proposals, so much as it is intended for proposals to improve the underlying platform.

Governance Proposals

Proposals for workflow and governance go here.

Federation Discussion

Working group for those interested in improving federation.

Social Media Group

This is the decision hub for the new Social Media Team. We propose campaigns, forms of user engagement, and strategies to raise awareness about the things we value collectively as a project.

Packaging Team

Group to discuss and plan packaging efforts for Linux distributions and other targets like app hosting platforms like Heroku.

GitHub repository governance

Discussions and votes regarding the government of the GitHub organization. Note! Membership to this group is restricted, it should only contain members who are a member of the Diaspora* organization in Github. This decision was made in proposal #659

diasporaproject.org Team

Working group for the relaunch of diasporaproject.org as a central starting point for the complete project and community overview.

Voting

Everybody in the subgroup that the proposal takes place in has one vote. When you create a proposal please try to make sure it is in the correct subgroup. Senior community members can move the proposal to another subgroup if that subgroup is the correct place.

When voting there are three options:

• Yes
• No
• Abstain
• Block

A proposal is passed if there are more Yes votes than No and Block votes together. Abstain does not count either way. Block does not block the proposal from passing, it is simply a strong message that more discussion might be needed. Maybe as a proposal maker if your proposal is getting many block votes it would be better to discuss a little more about the proposal.

Proposals

Follow these guidelines;

• Before creating a proposal it is a good idea to discuss it first by creating a discussion.
• Make the proposal absolutely clear on what is proposed. People cannot vote on vague proposals!
• If the proposal includes technical details or long text, put it in the proposals category and link that page to the Loomio proposal.
• Do not create proposals on things that cannot be done. We don't need proposals on features that everybody wants but that need developers to do the code. Making a proposal about a feature will not get it done any faster.
• Make sure you have a sufficiently long time for voting, one week is a good generic timeslot for normal proposals. Larger issues or critical feature decisions could have longer times.