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What's the best platform for an open collaborative project? (feddit.org)

submitted 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) by ki4jgt@feddit.org to c/programming@programming.dev

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I'm working on an open source classification system for the web (alphanumeric calls with an XXX.XXX.XXX format) -- called the Open Classification System. I'd like to have open forums for public discussion and feedback, but restrictive voting for board members.

Thinking of going old-school democracy and appointing board members randomly, instead of by vote -- to keep things relevant to laymen.

Basically, like the Dewey Decimal System, things will need to be moved around and recategorized over time.

SOC.ANT.CUL may eventually become SCI.ANT.CUL, for example.

Unlike the OCLC, I don't plan on suing everyone who uses the system for every tiny IP violation.

I'm needing it broad enough to cover a range of topics: from product domains and local municipalities to academic disciplines.

All I'm seeing right now is Reddit. Lemmy isn't nearly as restrictive enough, but I don't want to worry about all the moderator tools and restrictions and BS either.

In your experience, what platforms work best for this kind of thing?

Public discussion
Approved board member voting

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[–] litchralee@sh.itjust.works 7 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

In a nutshell, there will not exist any premade, out-of-the-box collaboration platform that works precisely for your use-case. And indeed, for anyone's use-case, because there are so many variables at play. Do you have:

to deal with scale of 10-100 people or 100k to 10M?
trolls and malicious actors that want to derail your project by bikeshedding?
a user base that might not already be skilled at recognizing toxic team members?
a legal entity for this project which is required to keep minutes or any other reporting requirements?
paid developers around the world, which only use this platform to talk to you, thus it must be secure to store PII?
and so on

The reason people think it's easy to choose a collaboration tool is because they see Teams and Slack and think that they can just buy a product (or a FOSS equivalent) and they can hit the ground running. But anyone who has set up a Slack community knows that there are a lot of rules and conventions that have to be established. For example, FTX (the failed cryptocurrency exchange) was using Slack emojis to approve business expenses. Setting aside that example of colossally bad financial controls, every org of any size must establish what their baseline processes are, and that extends to the collaboration platform.

but I don't want to worry about all the moderator tools and restrictions and BS either.

Moderation is not optional. Every non-trivially sized collection of people will end up with disagreements that distract from their joint reason for being there. To not moderate is a choice, as demonstrated most succinctly by this post: https://www.techdirt.com/2022/11/02/hey-elon-let-me-help-you-speed-run-the-content-moderation-learning-curve/

At the very least, the collab platform you choose to use should have some tooling for a future moderator to utilize, so that you don't have to switch platforms the moment someone reveals themselves to be a neo-nazi, starts spamming swastikas into the chat, and you're powerless to do anything about it. For small groups, it's less probable but the risk grows over time.