Lots of great ideas on the thread. However, to attract some people to the project, coming up with lists of concrete goals and requirements would be very helpful. What criteria do you need to meet to join the project? Can you just say you want to join or are there other requirements involved? What specific tasks do you need members or volunteers to work on?
aschrijver mentioned people might tend to volunteer to do the parts they like and avoid the chores. Everyone has different ideas of what they consider the fun parts. For me, that might be coding. However, there are some projects I want to code because they fill a need and some I’m not interested in because I’d never use the results. The trick is finding people who have a similar enough goal and are going to be working on it anyway. The hard part is getting people to agree on ways to accomplish a goal. It doesn’t help if two people want to write a program to do X and one is writing in Rust and another is coding it in C. You need enough in common that the different volunteer efforts can be coordinated or combined together in a way that provides added value instead of detracting or competing for resources.
Liked the comments about a social coding initiative. I haven’t felt comfortable with commercial sites to share software. I typically try to send my code fixes back upstream to the original projects. However, many projects aren’t interested in my modifications for various reasons such as not desiring to support yet another platform. (I do a lot of cross-platform application development.) That leaves me with tons of patches and modifications I maintain. I’ve tried sharing the patches with others via the web, but there doesn’t seem to be any interest in them. Would be nice to connect programmers with people who may be interested in using or beta testing their modifications, forks or customizations of software.
Would also be nice to use the Fediverse and the various Creative Commons, public domain and other Free multimedia resources to unite consumers/artists (similar to users/programmers) for other artistic purposes besides programming/code. Saw mention of using the Fediverse for game jams and shared worlds in another thread. A long time interest of mine is public domain fan fiction. It would be nice to have shared worlds to create multimedia for without having to worry about problems with copyright, drm, etc. Would love to get involved a shared world writing project. The Fediverse might be a great way to facilitate a project like that. Would be great to create interesting enough shared creative worlds that people would want to share stories, music and videos about it (and maybe even games). It would also encourage people to seek out Fediverse options to access that content.
