Exploring SX
How to transition from app development to Social Experience Design of integrated Fediverse solutions.
Table of contents
This page contains summary of findings for Taskweave, derived from broad exploration. Details can be found in the child pages.
Focus areas
What makes federated application development particularly challenging, and how can we address these challenges with Taskweave and Groundwork? Exploration found a number of focus areas:
| Focus area | Description |
|---|---|
| Ad-hoc interoperability | App-specific federation extensions that are created on-the-fly and can only interoperate on the basis of app-by-app integrations. |
| Substrate formation | People, processes, tools and artifacts that collaboratively ease onboarding and adoption of interoperable mechanism, that allow the ecosystem as a whole to evolve. |
| Free software development lifecycle | Typical motivations, expectations, development processes and practices that drive successful free software projects. |
Major challenges
While exploring the focus areas, several major challenges have been found. These challenges relate to the Fediverse as a whole. The Solidground project wants to address them where possible, so as to add most value to those using the process.
| Challenge | Description | |
|---|---|---|
| CHA-1 | Lack of a shared (technology) vision | People just use the Fediverse in its current state without asking what it could be in the future. The potential and opportunities are insufficiently explored. |
| CHA-2 | Fix Fediverse Adoption Lifecycle | A combination of factors make onboarding and “crossing the chasm” very hard, and combined with growing complexity in the ecosystem this stifles innovation. |
| CHA-3 | Substrate Formation for the Fediverse | The technological landscape is fragmented and opaque, community is dispersed and not very collaborative, while the processes for evolving the ecosystem are immature or undefined. |
| CHA-4 | Representation of the Fediverse | With nobody able to represent the Fediverse, it is not possible to anticipate to developments elsewhere, reach out and collaborate with other communities, and follow collective strategies for Fediverse evolution. |
Solutions
Become part of Social Coding Movement (CHA-3)
Solidground will not only be a practitioner of Social Coding, but be part of the co-shared Discuss Social Coding community forum. Solidground will:
- Adopt best-practices and implement features that tackle social coding challenges.
- Contribute documentation to social coding website relating to challenges and best-practices.
- Participate to help reach substrate formation objectives of Social Coding Foundations.
Encourage Living Documentation best-practices (CHA-2)
A structured process is ideal for creating consistent documentation. Solidground strives to lower barriers and maintain living documentation, to the benefit of both the project and ecosystem.
- Templates, diagrams, checklists to guide stakeholders along, lessen documentation chores.
- Code generation from templates, diagrams, checklists, encourage documentation consistency.
Taskweave contributes to Fediverse substrate (CHA-2)
Fediverse has near non-existent substrate to its ecosystem. Fediverse Enhancement Proposal (FEP) process is immature, and Socialhub community unable to foster ecosystem evolution.
Solidground will focus on formulating procedures and find best-practices that benefit substrate formation. The project strives to contribute to the Fediverse ecosystem at three levels:
- Open standards: Help continue the work that started in the W3C so that new standards may emerge. This may involve setting up a new governance structure.
- Protocol extensions: Help mature the FEP process so it becomes relevant and useful, and brings clarity and reduced complexity in creating interoperable applications.
- Vocabulary extensions: Help provide comprehensive guidance and organization on how both application- and domain-specific ActivityPub extensions are to be modeled.