A New Decision Process

It has been almost six months since I had the idea of a federated blogging application that would use ActivityPub. Since that time, Plume has evolved a lot. However, I have been the only to take decisions about what the project should become so far, acting as what is often called BDFL (Benevolent Dictator For Life). But it's absolutely not how I want Plume to be managed.

Now that the first Alpha have been released, I think it is time to get the community more involved in the project.

Code of conduct

The first step to make Plume a more welcoming place for people who want to help, was to add a Code of Conduct. Fortunately GitHub has a feature that let's you add one in seconds, simply by selecting the one that suits the best your needs. I opted for the « Contributor Covenant Code of Conduct », which disallows any kind of harassment or oppressive behavior, and encourages respect, constructive criticism and empathy toward other members of the community.

Democratic decision process

I decided to open a Loomio group for Plume (and hopefully that was the last decision I took alone 😋), on Framasoft's instance, called Framavox (thanks a lot for hosting it by the way). Loomio is a tool that let you discuss a topic, and organize voting sessions around a specific topic.

Everyone has the right to access this group, to take parts in debates and to vote, so don't hesitate to join it!

I just would like to define a clear process for votes:

• all the voting sessions should be open for exactly two weeks (you can configure that when starting a new vote)
• once a vote is closed, depending on the results, issues will be created on GitHub (or not if not needed), preferably with a link to the Loomio discussion.
• issues in the GitHub repository are considered as accepted, so don't debate there, and don't open an issue to start a debate, use the Loomio instead. New issues can be opened on GitHub directly if they are about something technical that doesn't need to be debated before.

A first vote to decide what to do with the current editor when a new visual one will be introduced is already open.

I hope more and more people will get involved in Plume, people who don't know how to write code but who can take part in a debate (and respect a code of conduct, of course 😉), and that it will no longer be considered as my project, because I want it to be owned by the community.