It was a fun call with lots of discussions.
- Welcome and round of introductions
- Summary of the story so far
- Aspiration to build projects under FOSS United Banner - called “Mon”. An umberella brand of products that will be launched under the banner of the Foundation.
- Social: A proposed social network which will be simple publishing + network.
- Why? Give an alternative to popular social networks - LinkedIn Medium etc. They are either forcing ads, manufacturing opinions. Why can’t communities make alternatives?
- Discussions about various alternatives - Mastodon is getting very popular. https://aana.site/ was shared as an example.
- Challenges: User Experience (UX), Design, Distribution. Federation is hard for common folks to understand.
- What are the goals of this project? Not clear - create a written proposal of the project
- Risks of hosting content: Will be curated and moderated.
- Other projects: Marketplace, Search (?), MyGate alternative (?). Utilities (?) “Scratch your own itch”
- Why create new ones when many exist? Why not? Most projects are going to fail. That is the nature of experimentation - out of 100, 97 will fail, but even if 3 succeed, it will be worth it.
- Create a set of guidelines for projects that can be launched under the “Mon” brand. Mon will give distribution to project and also have a home for it. Anyone who is motivated to build projects will build them.
- Software and Services: Most software projects have now become “platforms” and there is a big gap in good services with network effects (ex. Wikipedia). So FOSSU can be a great NPO to back such “services” or “platforms” and provide hosting.
- Other FOSS U Activities:
- Explore 2nd conference in Feb / Mar
- Fund raising
Please free to add / comment for things I may have missed.