MCOSI Meeting Briefing – January 19th 2019
On January 19th, the Minds Community Open Source Initiative (MCOSI) held a meeting which was attended by Luculent, Medworthy, Realmindschan (three founding members of the MCOSI), i3utm, Iamtheoh, Iancrossland (a founding member of Minds), as well as Minds staff members Jakepassi and Nick. The meeting was also independently observed by several Minds community members.
The meeting was comprised of a number of topics, first of was to welcome the new members and followed by a conversation about the minds.com roadmap documentation. Like most large scale open source projects, a roadmap is usually produced for both internal usage and for community members, third party developers and other interested parties to review the progress, future development and as well as to provide clarification about upcoming goals. Roadmaps are generally easy to find and to view by any interested parties, however up until fairly recently, the minds.com roadmap was not provided as a publicly viewable document. During this meeting the MCOSI learnt that Minds has provided a roadmap based Gantt chart and are hoping to produce supplemental roadmap documentation (which will be published by a member of staff and will also be included as part of the MCOSI channel).
As well as the introduction of the roadmap, the usage of asana.com (a third party project management service) and github.com (a hosting service that is generally used for development version control and source code storage, maintenance and other related development purposes) has been replaced with the more publicly accessible gitlab.com service.
Community feature requests have been in the process of being transferred from the asana and github services to the new gitlab service, which included approximately 750 requests that have been separated into 15 individual categories. Also within the meeting, the subject of bug testing was also discussed, in which three bug testing sections have been provided. These current number of bugs amount to approximately 220 existing unique issue, which have been separated into uber-testing, triage and production bug sections.
Minds staff have also confirmed the future production of changelog documentation (which will provide information about updates for future versions of the minds.com platform, mobile applications and related frameworks). Both the changelogs and roadmaps will be provided as detailed documentation via gitlab and will also be reproduced as accessible and easy to digest documents that will be published as blog articles for all community members to view.
Within the meeting, there was discussion about a friendship permission system. Whilst this is idea is within the initial phases, the idea of a friendship system is to provide functionality that would provide community members with a facility that is not dissimilar to how friends request provisions function within other existing social media platforms. The friendship permission system would allow community members to post content that is only available be their own designated list of friends. This list would also allow community members to select groups that can access a private live group chat facility.
The final topic that was discussed within the meeting was the idea for a wider community administration facility, which would allow trustworthy, experienced and knowledgeable community members to gain certain administration powers and be provided with tokens in regards to fulfilling certain duties. All actions (in relation to these duties) will be available to be overviewed by other community administrators and also by staff members to assure that there is no rough or inappropriate behaviour being conducted by any individual administrator. This idea is based upon the transparency and accountability of content moderation practices as defined within minds.com bill of rights.
Both the friendship permission system and community administration facilities are in fairly early stages and will be discussed further in future meetings.
As part of the Minds Community Open Source Initiatives commitment to support the Minds platform, there has been various discussions about the MCOSI structure and the founding members have produced a MCOSI organisational chart which attempts to provide some clarification about the structure for the provisions of the MCOSI.
As usual, Minds Community Open Source Initiatives welcomes constructive comments, suggestions and opinions from the wider minds.com community as part of the endeavour to help to provide and support a truly transparent and open source social media platform.
References & Other Resources:
* Minds Community Open Source Initiative
* 2019, MCOSI and Community Collaboration
* Introducing Minds Community Open Source Initiative
* MCOSI Supplemental Website
* Minds.com Gantt Roadmap Chart
* Minds.com Gitlab Repository
* Minds.com Bill of Rights
* MCOSI Organisation Chat