Cool and useful: Fedora Social Network (by Tatica)

On a mission Number Zero post.
As a new member of Ambassadors team at Fedora Latam, i’ve found really cool ideas in my mentors and coworkers at Fedora Project.
A very nice idea i’ve found is from Tatica about a Fedora Social Network not intended just for chatting and sharing cool things as we share it anyway in twitter, identica, facebook, gnewbook and so.
I really like Tatica’s idea because it could be a good thing sharing on a friendly site, a really great work done by our present teams and SIGs, in a way than users interested to join can take a look on the work being done and starting to show their works not in the “official” site, but in their own portfolios accesible for teams and people looking for others to getting things done.
Also, i’m user of an “arising” web application for Social Networks intended for collaborative work, and with many tools included: Crabgrass. It’s not SaaS, it’s really FaiF and maybe i get you interested showing Tatica’s Fedora Social Network and Crabgrass as a mixture to outreach a greater number of likely collaborators in a cool and even informal way, without losing the farsight and mission of Fedora Project.
That said, let me introduce you to some key concepts on Tatica’s proposal and the present stage of Crabgrass development (Tatica’s idea quoted):

Fedora as a community has too many people that want contribute; but also has too many tool and the connection between them is not always easy to find.

CG: While [we use] the web to communicate publicly, we are still mostly using inadequate tools to communicate amongst ourselves. [...] email, lists, and wikis— but these tools are not suited for the complexity of relationships in the real world.

Our wiki is not a communitay site, and should not be one. This is because social networks work better with people groups. “People like to see what’s everyone doing… in a pretty way”

CG: By social networking, we mean the ability of users to get to know one another through their online contributions and presence.

Having soo many tools makes the unifiying work almost impossible; because we send the message that “is ok that everyone try their own tool and try to work their own way”

CG: By group collaboration, we mean the ability of small groups to get things done, such as share files, track tasks and projects, make decisions and build repositories of shared knowledge. By network organizing, we mean the ability of multiple groups to work together on projects in a democratic manner.
The perfect place where all ambassadors can meet

Also, if any of our contributors want to be part of our family, is easier to have a “social network” with fun and cool info about the team.

Why just a “social network” simulated? It’d be best a real social network and making task-groups, and networks of new and experimented collaborators working together before publishing a nice done job.
To get things done, CG provides tools like task list management,
meeting scheduling, asset management, wiki, and decision making (polls and ballots) // When it is time to get the word out, CG allows groups to create a customized home page where a group can list their event calendar, blog postings, and other public content.

If we think in productivity for our contributors, we also need to know that even if we have a huge and awesome team, we still need help.

CG: Share content with exactly the people and groups you want. You can grant access to view, edit, or administer content. And see whick people are accessing to your work, even if they can’t edit or delete nothing if you or the council of your group doesn’t want it.

We know that we have community sites, but most of the times we only have ambassadors localized… not users, neither regular contributors [...] What if we turn “local pages” into groups of a single website with an easy url?

CG: I.e. an easy url: https://we.riseup.net/crabgrass/about

Most of the problems we have to identify our contributors is to “know” what they do. We as mentors lose time figuring our what our new people is capable to do.. so, we can provide a “portfolio” to each team that they want to you.

CG: Every person can create her own galleries (and versioned his files), letting other commenting it, rating, sharing with others and so. Also, they could share his work on groups they get approval for join and sharing things. Task lists are also shareable with groups, with friends, with fine grained reading/writing permissions.
All this power for just an user? Imagine what could be done in groups being leaded by a capable council (an special committee with protecting powers for the sake of the order in a group). Also, the work of a group can be shared with other groups or specific people, again, customizing permissions for each entity in an easy way.

What happens with the people that -want to learn about something-?

CG: Decision making tools: approval voting and ranked voting; this is another tool available to each person/group. Among other things, could be used to know which is the most wanted workshop, wallpaper, or any proposal you want to know.
Example: https://we.riseup.net/users/the-next-minor-feature

Also assign task to “all the people that we already know that can help us”.

CG: You can choose to receive notification when a page is updated and you can send notices to people when you want to alert them to a change.

An agenda! without leave the same tool!!

CG: This is actually in progress and unfinished, but with a little bit of more help we’ll be able to deliver: Calendaring: group calendars, private calendars, public calendars, events, meeting scheduling, oh my!

An organized list of all the tickets that we have in a single page!! How many of us reply tickets from different projects?

CG: At this very moment, every user has an inbox with 4 filters inside the scope of present capabilities of CG as social network: object-type (i didn’t mentioned is a Rails app?), by friends, by groups, and state (read, unread).
So, this is an idea not so hard to getting to reality.
Do you have similar ideas? Would you like to share with us?
What about dropping them in the discussion page of Tatica’s original
idea? http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/User:Tatica/Infra
In solidarity, and in love of our core values:
Freedom, Friends, Features, First
Jesús E. Franco Martínez
Fedora Ambassador from México
http://identi.ca/tzk
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/User:Tezcatl
Tagged: ambassadors, fedora, fedora-social-network, identica, marketing, on-a-mission