Opening the circle of maintainers and publics

allmende
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In the last soon four years, allmende.io has developed from a personal pet project to a meaningful infrastructure for few communities.

From early steps

to shy experiments

to a migration of all of allmende.io into Ecobytes infrastructure, this place and the allmende.io community has remained pretty much quiet. Now we are opening up the infrastructure to a wider range of users and contributors. To initiate the conversation, I am offering the following questions in whose answeres I am interested in, and believe a wider community would be, too, to provide entrance points and present actual needs of help:

  1. How do you want the computational commons, comprised of its #allmende-io:sub-domains, be presented and maintained?
  2. Which ideas do you have for the sites
  3. How to improve the voluntary support in the various channels?
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There should be more public accessible information on allmende.io about what is meant with digital commons, about the ways to involve oneself into the commons.

A much more easy way to give donations has to be present.

The datengarten is now kind of flagship and of great use for everybody who is not willing to use google. I can suppose there will be a great run on allmende infrastructure in the coming months and years. For that we need more active maintainers for the infrastructure, and perhaps a more organic design :herb:

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I have been lurking around the edges of allmende and ecobytes for some years now. Multiple shared connections kept me stumbling into digital spaces where Ecobytes & Allmende were active.

I’m aligned with the idea for a digital commons but have found it difficult to become more engaged. As a non-coder the use of git creates a barrier for engagement, and the €60 fee to join Ecobytes was a bit of a hurdle when at the time I wasn’t sure which tools I would use and what for. Neither of these are insurmountable for me - but if I look back at whats happened I think this is what has held back my engagement.

Now I stand in a place where I’m involved in multiple projects building commons for which access to the tools of allmemde would be most useful and no doubt the correct thing to do - rather than these projects adopting the silo tools that most people know and default to using.

I am happy to think of allmende.io as a digital commons of which I am a part (thanks for the access to Next Cloud for SoilHack :smiley:) But how I will engage and help steward our commons is currently somewhat unclear.

I can certainly guide more like minded individuals towards allmende.io - as @yova suggests a clearer pathway for people to become allmende.io commoners would be valuable. As a native English speaker, and a non-coder, maybe I could help to make on-boarding easier for people less technically inclined? (This is what I offered Ecobytes - but at that time got confused/tripped by git and my inability to engage in the organisation workflows.)

Looking at the communities building quickly around disroot.org and social.coop, I wonder if there is stuff that we can learn about building a user base - where people can get quick and cheap/free access to the tools they need, while also being guided into an active commons, where they can easily be involved in its governance and find easy ways to help with its stewardship. After people start to use the services and come to value them and the advantages of being commoners, I would hope they would be more likely to lend support in maintaining their commons.

My practical experiences in this area would suggest that there would be many more people who like and theoretically support the ideas, and even use the services than who will actively engage in the stewardship of the commons. I guess the art is in making easy pathways, and even encouragements, for people to lend this support - be that support through paying a fee for access to some services (a sliding scale + can be free on request like social.coop do?) or easy ways to become involved in governance, development, maintenance, outreach, etc. etc.

I’m excited by the prospects and happy to be involved.

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How to become engaged? Why is Gitlab needed, although … Well, you try to get more SysAdmins involved as a community? What about the ones which do not want to be that actively involved?

Where is the place to work on which project and in which way do we use the tool / how to work together on topics?

We see the benefits, but well… how to start with member engagement? What exactly is allmende.io? How do members see themselves? What roles do members have (seen as tasks they perform)?

Easy pathways: How to become a supporting/ non-techie vs SysAdmin member and where to start working on which topic. But first: Explain what you are and what you are not. Explain the goals and subgoals, and how to work at which place for which subgoal. Without these basic clarifications members cannot work together, do not really form a common group and therefore hardly find new members.