Get Involved

Overview

You don't have to be a programmer to contribute to this project!

Firstly, come say hello in our chat room if you'd like to help out or are interested to learn how

We are happy to have designers, critical thinkers, artists, hackers, documenters, etc. involved in this project! There is a lot of work to do, if you find this project interesting, we want to have you working with us.

There are a number of "roles" such as "operator", "maintainer", "organiser" which we've tried to come up with to make it more clear how you can relate to the project and how you can find ways to be involved which suit your interests. If you don't fit one of these roles, that is fine.

We have an irregular online check-in for contributors of this project to let each other know what we're working on, how much time we've spent on it and how to coordinate further work.

We have a status page showing what we are aiming to achieve in the near future. That gives a good overview of where we're going together.

We use issue trackers and project boards to keep track of what we're working on right now. We collectively review these, to keep track of our time spent vs. budget available.

Compensation

We think that it is important to focus on making the libre software ecosystem sustainable. This has historically not been the case. It feels important to contextualise this position. In the words of LURK:

Big tech and an abusive misunderstanding of free and open source software practices have led us to believe that software production, server maintenance and on-line services should be free as in gratis. However there is no such things as a free lunch and software does not exist in a vacuum. If we want sustainable alternatives and a diverse cultural sector, these alternatives and the humans behind them, need to be supported.

And a short excerpt from Seven Theses On The Fediverse and The Becoming Of FLOSS:

Without substantial funding for ongoing development and maintenance, these projects will remain contingent upon the exploitation of the free labor of well-meaning individuals, or subject to the whims of people making time for their FLOSS hobby.

We want to build a flourishing, inclusive, accessible project and paying people for their work (not just writing source code, but other forms of organising and care work too!) has a role to play in that. We think that making it possible to compensate contributors for working on Co-op Cloud is a way to get involved with self-organising sustainability from the start.

We haven't worked this all out. We've opened up an Open Collective account and we're running this as an "invite only mode" approach.

If you want to make a contribution to Co-op Cloud and you'd like to be compensated, please come and chat to us first.