To conclude the last four months of intensive bootstrapping and experimentation within the degrowth.net platform, and to follow up with what is yet to come, here we give a short outlook on finalising aspects before being completely ready for rumble.
Editorial
The ❓ Degrowth.net blog at degrowth.net/act and the learn.degrowth.net end-user documentation ask us for attention, too, and should not be empty upon an anticipateable (technical) launch of the degrowth.net community. Who is up for grabs and would like to pair up for a short writing sprint, either on technical documentation by providing an untainted view, or by helping to formulate the still empty abstracts in the blog?
Consolidation for coherence
In trying to stabilise the outside experience of our integrated communication and publication efforts in 💬 Networking between different Degrowth groups, we can ask ourselves in many ways how to reduce friction and confusion for external third parties. One bigger question with wider impact would be:
The group assemblies are currently communicated at @groups.degrowth.net, but the messages directed there end up in agora.degrowth.net here. For me this may be one level of indirection too much to cope with when joining as an uninformed, new user.
Please note the
agora.addresses (URLs) will remain intact and simply redirect from old to newgroups., if chosen to do so.
Namespace hierarchy of categories
When we acknwledge that the flows of our information streams represent quite literally the inclusion and exclusion mechanisms of a given discourse, we come to regard the structures emerging from such activity as malleable only if being named. The authority lies in how we name things, and how these are helping to be accessible and useful resources for others. Right now we have squeezed all discussion in the Agora into the #group-assembly-process category, and new children are already forseeable.
Would there be an option to consider the whole Agora as the space in which the Group Assemblies convene? Then we can move all groups one level up in the hierarchy, and earn the option to have publicly visible first-level discussion spaces, all with icon, description and so on, and below them categories with private organisation spaces.
Identity federation
With the chat.degrowth.net service emerging, we are close to finishing the first wave of suggested online facilites for collective production. Another aspect that is going to be implemented before the launch is a so-called identity provider, a single source of truth for usernames and passwords. WIth extending the basic available system to contemporary federated identity providers, we will also be able to offer single sign-on for all associated and supported services. The progress of this is thoroughly documented in:
Outlook
Meanwhile we continue to explore good ways of providing useful advice to novice users of the various interfaces available by now, and seek to describe the governance model as a computational commons, following the example of allmende.io.