Community anniversary

English language media;

Some larger sites... Even one of these writing about the current situation would be good.

• Gizmodo (http://gizmodo.com/5949784/whatever-happened-to-facebook+killer-diaspora)
• Motherboard (http://motherboard.vice.com/blog/what-happened-to-the-facebook-killer-it-s-complicated)
• The Verge (http://www.theverge.com/2012/10/8/3472588/diaspora-social-network-history)
• TechCrunch (http://techcrunch.com/2012/08/27/diaspora-founders-hand-project-to-community/)
• Examiner (http://www.examiner.com/article/diaspora-social-network-founders-call-it-quits)
• PC Authority (http://www.pcauthority.com.au/News/313461,social-network-diaspora-becomes-a-community-project.aspx)
• Digital Trends (http://www.digitaltrends.com/social-media/diaspora-turns-itself-over-to-the-people/)
• Worldcrunch (http://www.worldcrunch.com/culture-society/can-these-alternative-ad-free-social-networks-oust-facebook-and-twitter-/pheed-diaspora-app.net-advertisement-data/c3s10389/)
• Shareable (http://www.shareable.net/blog/diaspora-a-new-beginning-or-a-crowdfunding-cautionary-tale)
• Dedoimedo (http://www.dedoimedo.com/computers/diaspora.html)
• Loggd.in (http://loggd.in/2012/02/thoughts-on-diaspora-new-social-network.html)

For those who have writers that can be "tipped" off a story or sent a request to write about Diaspora* we should send a message explaining the situation and proposing a look on the current situation. Of course those that are powered by guest writers we would need someone to actually write an article that we can submit.

I think we should at least formulate an email to send to any prospect sites asap and then we start with that - anyone just send to any sites they find, requesting some coverage of the situation.

Will try to help with this tomorrow.

One thing which would be great to do is to set up dedicated development groups to work on certain key and major aspects of the software. I can think of:

• Federation
• Communication protocol (Tent etc)
• Account migration
• Installation packaging
• and I'm sure there are others.

If we can establish this before the anniversary, we can put out a call for developers to help with one of these areas. We'd ask developers to commit to devoting a few hours per week to this task, which would really help to get these key things moving.

(I realise there has been a lot of work done on certain elements, for example Debian packaging, but there's a lot more to do on others.)

Actually, the Debian packaging group can be a model for how this can be done.

What we'd need to do now, I think, is:

1. Establish which areas we need to set up dedicated groups for.
2. Appoint a project co-ordinator for each one - someone who understands the issue fairly well and can co-ordinate the work of everyone in that group.

Once this is done, we can advertise for developers both in Diaspora itself and in any publicity we do for the anniversary.

@goob this topic is more about communication, to choose this group, I think organize ourselves is a better place to discuss. It's a good idea to use the anniversary to find volunteers, but we don't need to explain precisely which group they can join in the main message.

At the moment, we need to prepare the buzz itself, so a blogpost, and graphic stuff to make people to be able to easily spread the word.

@flaburgan I agree - I'm not suggesting to do all the organisation on this thread - but it's useful to come up with ideas what we can do for the community anniversary (which is what this topic is) so that we can then organise (on other threads, perhaps) and communicate these ideas!

I've created a draft press release.

I know there's a lot wrong with it, but I've never tried to write a press release before. At least it can be a launching point for your ideas to create something good.

Please dive in and attack it viciously with your editing scissors. Let's get something really great together that we can send out to loads of media in advance of the anniversary!

@seantilleycommunit @jonnehass @florianstaudacher just to let you know I've mentioned you by name as you've been the three co-ordinators of the project and I think you deserve mention - please delete your name if you're not happy with this. Also if I've missed anyone out whose been equally central to the project over the past year, please add them.

@goob (or maybe @seantilleycommunit ?) I saw the post from Dhq calling for art work. I created a wiki page about Branding (see the corresponding Loomio discussion), could you please include a link to it for the next message like that? (we need to improve it first, and precise a license for the images)

So, random idea: Making the most of a community anniversary, can we refer to August 27th as Diaspora Day?

We could make a bit of a push for some of our friends and colleagues to try out Diaspora on that day, and facilitate hooking up physical groups of people that all know each other in the acts of:
* making new friends
* finding new tags to follow
* things to post about
* how to use your privacy settings

We could also point out to more technical people how to set up pods of their own. There's been a lot of work put into the Installation Guides. Judging on how Debian packaging is coming along, we could also officially update Debian-specific instructions, which for a lot of people might make installing and deploying D* pretty easy.

We could also have people hit up the #DiasporaDay hashtag on different socnets. New users could talk about taking part in it, and anyone could hit up the tag if they had a question or needed help.

Do you guys think we could do a thunderclap like for FirefoxOS or it'll be ridiculous?

Btw, I do not really like Diaspora Day, I'd prefer put the community forward this famous day.

I don't think we have enough weight for a thunderclap to actually be meaningful :P But I guess it doesn't hurt if someone wants to organize it.

I don't actually know what a thunderclap is in this context, but I think it's best to stick to 'slowly growing, slowly developing, quietly publicising'.

As has been said before, what diaspora doesn't need is a huge influx of new users. It needs if anything new developers, and it's been wonderful over the past few months to see the team of developers growing and the number of pull requests and fixes increasing.

Making a really big noise to get some publicity risks overselling ourselves. As we don't have to achieve certain numbers of users by certain dates to satisfy shareholders, let's dare to be different and just say plainly what's been happening: slow building with rock-solid testing to achieve the end goal of a fantastic, privacy-aware decentralised social web. We can put out a call for new developers to join the team as well, as this would be a big help to everyone, I'm sure.

Have a look at the draft press release I've linked below. It's really rough, and needs a lot of work from you guys to make it ready for release. Look forward to seeing what you do with it.

I'm thinking to do an announcement about the upcoming anniversary via the dHQ account. Asking for artwork was part of this, but I forgot to mention the anniversary! Is there anything particular you think I should say in this post?