Hi everyone!
As y'all know, Matt has stepped back from StP, and @Brookeeeeeeeee and I at MycoSystems have inherited the reigns to this wonderful community. A few months ago, we wrote a post outlining some of our ideas and plans for how we can make improvements to the forum and enhance the community as a whole.
It's been a while since this was all initially announced, and I figured it was time to fill everyone in on everything that's been going on and how things are going to move forward.
Between last October and today, we have spent our time overhauling our collective's infrastructure, that being all the interlocking backend technical systems that support a number of organizations, collectives, and activist groups, including Squat the Planet. These are changes that y'all as users don't see but are important for higher site reliability, better performance, and an improved capacity to add useful features and to migrate the forum to an open-source platform going into the future.
Ultimately, the backend items we have been focusing on have been for the benefit of our infrastructure as a whole, and are not limited to StP itself. Some of the big ideas we discussed in our past posts have been a bit beyond our capacity to work on over the last few months. I am very much hoping to change this and to give this community the love and labor it deserves. Unfortunately, the projects that pay our bills inevitably take the wind out of the projects we do for free, at least until we're able to hit the road in our van and leave most of the bills behind us.
To account for the very annoying issue of needing money to exist, I had a few ideas I wanted to propose to y'all that would allow us to pour more time into StP:
So that's the gist of what's going on and where we're at. I'm sorry about the radio silence from @Brookeeeeeeeee and I over the last few months, and I'll be doing my best to get more involved in StP directly from here on out, both as a developer and as a community member. So y'all can expect more info and updates from us soon, both for site-wide updates as well as personal ones. To accompany this post, I will soon be working on a thorough thread/webpage to aggregate all the ideas/features that we are hoping to proceed with, including a feedback mechanism so y'all can submit your own ideas and so we can collectively decide on how everything is prioritized.
Feel free and respond with any thoughts, questions, or concerns y'all have about this post or about StP in general, and me or @Brookeeeeeeeee will do our best to respond in a timely manner. Looking forward to hearing from y'all!
-eyes & brooke
As y'all know, Matt has stepped back from StP, and @Brookeeeeeeeee and I at MycoSystems have inherited the reigns to this wonderful community. A few months ago, we wrote a post outlining some of our ideas and plans for how we can make improvements to the forum and enhance the community as a whole.
It's been a while since this was all initially announced, and I figured it was time to fill everyone in on everything that's been going on and how things are going to move forward.
Between last October and today, we have spent our time overhauling our collective's infrastructure, that being all the interlocking backend technical systems that support a number of organizations, collectives, and activist groups, including Squat the Planet. These are changes that y'all as users don't see but are important for higher site reliability, better performance, and an improved capacity to add useful features and to migrate the forum to an open-source platform going into the future.
Ultimately, the backend items we have been focusing on have been for the benefit of our infrastructure as a whole, and are not limited to StP itself. Some of the big ideas we discussed in our past posts have been a bit beyond our capacity to work on over the last few months. I am very much hoping to change this and to give this community the love and labor it deserves. Unfortunately, the projects that pay our bills inevitably take the wind out of the projects we do for free, at least until we're able to hit the road in our van and leave most of the bills behind us.
To account for the very annoying issue of needing money to exist, I had a few ideas I wanted to propose to y'all that would allow us to pour more time into StP:
- First, I want to reopen the donations page for any wonderful people whom are able to contribute what they are able. Our cost of living is relatively low for the most part, so any contributions at all would go a long way towards allowing us to put more time into StP in place of the constant time-sink of our for-profit contracting gigs.
- Second, we have been talking about the idea of relaunching the merch store, since Matt is no longer maintaining the original Etsy StP store. While we will probably continue to sell some of the original merch (I do very much love the original stickers, patch, and bandana), I'd really like to bring in some new artists and launch some newer, high quality StP merch made by small artists. I think it'd be even cooler if we could get some creative StP users to be the ones to deisgn the merch! (And ofc the proceeds from these merch sales would be split equitably with the artists). If y'all are receptive to this idea, I'll probably create a "call to StP artists" post in the near future with more detail on how this would work. In the mean time, if there are any artists interested in this, feel free and DM me!
- And third, it would be awesome to bring more people on board to the StP Dev team. If you have experience with Docker, NGINX, Discourse, or general web development, and if you have the drive/capacity to help out, please send me a DM and we can figure out how you might be able to plug in!
So that's the gist of what's going on and where we're at. I'm sorry about the radio silence from @Brookeeeeeeeee and I over the last few months, and I'll be doing my best to get more involved in StP directly from here on out, both as a developer and as a community member. So y'all can expect more info and updates from us soon, both for site-wide updates as well as personal ones. To accompany this post, I will soon be working on a thorough thread/webpage to aggregate all the ideas/features that we are hoping to proceed with, including a feedback mechanism so y'all can submit your own ideas and so we can collectively decide on how everything is prioritized.
Feel free and respond with any thoughts, questions, or concerns y'all have about this post or about StP in general, and me or @Brookeeeeeeeee will do our best to respond in a timely manner. Looking forward to hearing from y'all!
-eyes & brooke
