MCOSI Meeting Briefing - March 30th 2019
The recent Minds Community Open Source Initiative (MCOSI) monthly meeting was held on March 30th. This meeting was attended by Luculent, Medworthy, Realmindschan (three founding members of the MCOSI), Csharpner and I3utm. Unfortunately due to a misunderstanding, Nick (the Minds staff administrator) was unable to attend this meeting.
Due to the misunderstanding, this meeting wasn't very long. However we did have the opportunity to catch up on examining ideas for the next Minds terms of service (Terms) agreement. Over the previous three weeks, MCOSI members reviewed a draft copy of the next version of the Terms policy and submitted a number of suggestions to the staff, this draft policy document is currently being reviewed by the Minds staff members and a revised version will be posted to the Minds Gitlab repository for further community consolation at a point within the near future (further information will be posted both by members of the Minds staff and the MCOSI once the revised draft Terms agreement has been added to Gitlab).
Over the last several months many community members have been asking about the implementation for a dark theme for the Minds platform and due to the work of Csharpener, a prepared theme has been submitted to Gitlab and is intended to be included within a future Minds update.
Minds community members may have noticed a new green badge being introduced. The inclusion of this new badge distinguishes staff members from other verified community members (the existing blue badge represents verified community members, whilst the new green badge represents Minds staff members).
Since the introduction of the opt-in Canary feature, the Minds development team have introduced a number of exciting experimental ideas for community members to test and provide further feedback upon.
Some of these experimental features includes several interface changes, including a new hashtag filtering system and a Discovery mode. The Discovery mode allows community members to further filter news feed content based upon specific time periods (which allows for the display of content that have been posted within the previous 12 hours, 24 hours, 7 days, 30 days and year), as well as providing a new functionality for displaying Top and Hot filtered content. These new Canary features provides a number options for the finer degree of filtered content to be displayed.
Due to community feedback, Canary also has introduced a Not-Suitable-For-Work (NSFW) facility and this idea is intended to replace the existing Explicated rating tag system. Please note that like all the features that have been introduced within Canary, the NSFW, Discovery and hashtag filtering functionalities have been provided as experiments, in which interested community members are encouraged to explore, test and provide further feedback, opinions and suggestions on.
The Canary experimental features can be be activated, as well as being deactivate (and the original site layout being reverted) by selecting the “Opt-in to Experiments” (Canary) option within the avatar menu or can be accessed via the link that has been provided below.
In addition, the Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) section has been recently replaced with a new searchable Help Desk facility. This facility provides an easier method for community members to be directed to specific Help and Support topics, which provides more convenient ways of tracking bugs and further support within the usage of the Minds platform.
Further to Canary, both the Minds developers and the MCOSI welcomes feedback, suggestions and ideas from the wider community. The Minds Community Open Source Initiative strives for community collaboration and encourages the community to subscribe to the MCOSI group so that the wider community can further support the Minds open source, open discourse social media platform.
References & Other Resources:
* Minds Canary
* Minds Help Desk
* Minds Community Open Source Initiative
* MCOSI Meeting Agenda - March
* 2019, MCOSI and Community Collaboration
* Introducing Minds Community Open Source Initiative
* MCOSI Supplemental Website