In our Common social groundwork outreach channel @trwnh asked what it means to participate in the Protosocial commons collective. While this needs a better description, I will start this thread by copying my response below. And see also the related post, from the same chat session, at Protosocial ActivityPub protocol - #9 by aschrijver
What is the Protosocial commons collective?
Protosocial is wordplay for "Prosocial protocol prototypes…, envisioning the future of the social web.
An informal group of people that effectively iterate towards a collective vision of the future social web, yet each still dedicated to those specific areas or facets they are most interested in, independently and autonomously, interacting however they wish and provides most benefit… A certain level of coordination needs to take place. And can be improved depending on our activities and how we combine them. There’s numerous overlapping areas, where collaborative efforts can increase progress, and you get more done than is possible when working all alone.
The overlap is not just in the technical work, but also all these other areas of the FSDL. Like outreach to draw attention to your project, and find the right kind of contributors to help, at the right time. That kind of thing.
Right now there are a number of outreach channels. Soon there’ll be more, as they become available by service development under Social coding commons. The fedi.foundation is an example, which can be a shared dev portal / e-zine for collaborative publishing on the general theme.
One of the most important aspects ultimately, is technology adoption. This is an eternal weak point in any FOSS effort where adoption is a crucial success factor, and where SX via the FSDL and SOSS wants to bring improvement.
Concretely, various parallel tracks may emerge, depending on passion and interest of participants in the collective…
- Shared (technology) vision of the future social web. Shared practices, foundational basis.
- “the linked data hypermedia web” ← @trwnh: “I want to explore this”
- “domain-driven service development” ← @aschrijver: “This is what I have in mind, for SX”
- … ← @someoneelse: “This is my particular passion area”
