How do we get more people involved?

Robin your concerns have been raised by others. Like me! A few months ago!

This project is for coders and only coders, as I see it. It would be great if there was the maturity to open this up to other people, but the requirement is that you code, and if you don't stay quiet.

Goob, you are not in the group anymore, I deleted you. If anyone does not want to be in the group "What is Community at Diaspora?" you are more than welcome to leave it. I am not holding anyone hostage there, so please do not represent it that way? Thanks. :)

madamephile please don't be a drama queen - just delete the subgroup as agreed by a vote ok? You are talking about openness but then you yourself don't follow a clear majority decision.

And please don't poison our community with slag talk. No one has told you to shut up. Diaspora* welcomes anyone to participate - but you have to participate by DOING something, not just talking about how things should be done.

So my question is - what are you doing to help Diaspora* except complaining that you are not allowed to participate?

To be fair (and because I like playing Devil's Advocate), what have we really offered to non-developers as far as ways to help are concerned? Really, at the moment our ecosystem favors developers; that in and of itself is fine, but we've got quite a few non-coders that would still like to help out.

The truth is, I don't think we've been as inclusive as we should be with non-devs. I could come up with a laundry list of ways just about anybody could help our project out right now, I'd be up to putting something together if Madame Philo and other community collaborators would be interested in making my job a little bit easier.

It's not enough to tell someone to participate; we ought to come up with some suggestions of things they can help us with. and how. After all, we're all here for the same reason: to help Diaspora succeed as a platform. :)

Sean, any non-developer can start running that show - blaming the developers for not giving action points to non-developers is just wrong :)

This project is for coders and only coders, as I see it.

Then you see it wrong (again). I'm not a coder, and I've been helping out in little ways for more than a year. This project is at an early stage at which the most activity is software development, but there's also what we've been doing in Loomio - discussing and making decisions about the future direction of the project, and how we will organise ourselves to achieve these aims. And there will increasingly be work in writing documentation, copy for the diaspora-project.org website, and so on, as the software becomes more highly developed. And - if you want to be supportive of Diaspora - you can write blogs about what's happening, how the development is progressing, what we hope to achieve in the future, and so on.

It's plain silly to say that this is an exclusive group, because it has been made clear that anyone is welcome to join and help out, and open invites have been made on Diaspora. If people choose not to bother to join and help out, that is their choice. A small trickle of people have been joining the Loomio group and contributing since it started.

Re your 'What is community at Diaspora?' group, the majority vote was for that group to be closed because it was superflous to what is being done on Loomio. Merely kicking me out of the group suggests that you're trying to form some sort of personal power base.

Sean, by all means write your 'laundry' list. You could post it as a blog post, or create an area in Github which are for non-dev projects, so that progress of those projects can be managed. Alternatively, we could reactivate the Teambox account which Yosem set up, it's an open-source and free of charge (but not FOSS) tool for project management.

I apologise I have not been actively helping out as much as I'd like to have in recent weeks. This is only because of health problems, and I hope I'll be able to help out more, soon. But would like to see a list of tasks so I could pick out and attempt any I felt up to tackling.

Let me add something positive to this discussion. I've looked up my local university (Bristol UK) and found that they have a Computer Science department, and found references to Ruby on their site.

When I have time I'll give them a call and ask them if it would fit in with any of their courses for some students to contribute to Diaspora. I can also offer them the use of the domain name I've bought (joindiaspora.org.uk) to set up a pod. As well as getting some development done this would create a (hopefully) well maintained UK pod, which there aren't any of at the moment.

I think these ideas of involving student groups are great - absolutely supported and if anyone can organize something like this then please do! The devs will always be able to help find tasks once such groups are identified.

Unfortunately, there isn't any lesson about Ruby at my school...

Ok so I spoke to someone at Bristol Uni and they told me that the deal with internships would be that we would have to put up £500 and they would match that, and in return we would get one month's full time work. I didn't get as far as speaking to anyone technical, they advised me to look at the details of the courses online to see which ones included what we needed. There are a couple which do programming but its not specific as to the language, so I'll give them a call back on Monday to find out more detail.