What are the aids and blocks toward collaborating on an open apps ecosystem?

I'll start with a story about the rea-project, which started with a very fast pace, led by a very enthusiastic developer who then got so sick he couldn't work anymore, and has not returned. Three people continue to work on it, but it's been refocused on the rea-app which is a new UI on top of Freedom Coop's Open Collaborative Platform. The goal remains to develop a modular UI that can be used on any back-end that can use the Value Flows vocabulary and protocols.

So one of the blocks remains the precarious state of the individuals who want to work on these collaborative software projects: their financial, physical, and mental health. One of the ways we could do better is to develop support systems for the collaborating software workers.

One of the aids for that project is the potential of immediate live users by developing on top of an existing system with an existing user base. But that also has its limitations: the live user base itself is just getting organized and is not using the existing system very fully.

One of the projects that intended to use the rea-project in the first place has not yet gotten started, some of which might be due to the illness of the person mentioned above, who was connected to that project, and also because of financial difficulties of the main organizer.

I still have high hopes for this project, but those seem to be common aids and blocks.

Without giving this topic the attention it truly deserves, I note as generically as possible that it's deeply challenging for talented & passionate people to collaborate inclusively on complex creative projects-- unless they adopt a leader-and-followers hierarchy, which I rarely recommend.

Our potential for developing truly inclusive vocabulary and decision process sometimes feels almost like wilderness terrain. I currently find it more productive to do mostly solo authorship work, but I realize that that will be terribly insufficient in the long term of facing our shared challenges. Developers will need to make more effective (although IMO generally limited, MVP) shared investments of creative energy and effort.

in my experience so far, i think:

aids

• eating your own dog food
• mad science method
• do-ocracy
• marathon: keep a slow & steady pace one step at a time
• straw person proposal

blocks:

• cave method: try to design or implement the perfect system before sharing it
• design by committee
• sprint: hype, mania, and burn-out
• waterfall design

best example

the best example of an open app ecosystem i've seen so far is Scuttlebutt. we miss you @bobhaugen! you got some recent mentions in this thread. if anyone is interested, come join us. :heart:

I agree about scuttlebutt as an effective development group. Re @gregorycassel 's comment above: scuttlebutt has leaders, but not a singular all-encompassing maximum leader.

I think leadership (as in, somebody gets there first and shows others the way) is necessary and unavoidable and can be excellent if the leader develops more leaders, which I think happens in scuttlebutt and also enspiral. I think an effective group process, like a cell, needs a nucleus and a membrane, which implies some degree of hierarchy, although the participants can also handle it like concentric circles where they continually invite and develop more nucleus members.

I think also, and this applies to both scuttlebutt and enspiral, leaders arise and collaborate effectively when they have different but complementary specialties. If they try to play exactly the same role, it might be better to form collaborating cells, which I think can be done consciously

If the leader is competitive and treats other potential leaders as rivals, as in some other groups we've seen, then they will cause problems, e.g. splits.

@ahdinosaur,, thanks for all the tips. I'll study them in a bit and maybe comment again.

We might have some interesting disagreements on some of your recommendations, but rather than quibble about the individual tips, I wonder how those would correlate to the difference between user-oriented and community-oriented design:
https://github.com/valueflows/valueflows/issues/224
https://github.com/valueflows/valueflows/issues/169

Sorry that one was so long. This is something I have been thinking about but have not really solved. I think a flock of tiny apps could be the software lego blocks I need, but they really do need to fit together well into systems, so some kind of overall design thinking is required, which I keep hoping https://www.valueflo.ws/ will provide.

Some kind of overall technical design is required, too, which is trickier. See also my rambling searching for a breakthrough notes if you are a glutton for punishment. Short version: I identified 3 candidates:
* Scuttlebutt
* Solid (W3C's semantic web architecture)
* Ceptr (which may be approaching an alpha release)

Problem being those three would have a hard time working together, so I keep thinking it has to be on (and of) the Web, which Solid is, but they got their own problems...

@lynnfoster and I had a long conversation about this in the car coming home from a family trip, and I think I am framing this wrong. A lot of the time, what I have been doing is not developing systems for existing networks, but developing software for one or more people who wants to organize a network, where the software is suppose to help them organize the network.

I'll have more to say about this tomorrow, if anybody is interested. Maybe they won't be, because Lynn says she doesn't quite get what I am talking about... :rabbit:

I completly agree with @ahdinosaur 's post.

I completly agree with @bobhaugen when you say :

the leader develops more leaders

I disgree with :

a cell, needs a nucleus and a membrane

There is no need to consider entities in the ecosystem as cells. I think it's more relevant to consider objectives and actions, and rules to make people able to contribute to the actions.

Recently I built a REST web service that simply indexes citizens offers and wants from other platforms, and filters them according to search criteria. This will go into production across Community forge 200+ sites.

But how should I invite the plethora of other platforms to use the service?

@matthewslater happy to hear of your progress!

But how should I invite the plethora of other platforms to use the service?

Thinking about your question, what platforms or kinds of platforms do you think would benefit from it? And might be aligned with your goals and values, or is that a not relevant question?

@draft

I disgree with :

a cell, needs a nucleus and a membrane

I'm happy to disagree about that for now. Not worth arguing about. But awaiting a live counter-example...