@jakehamilton so many things, but what i would probably mainly do is tools, like a VCS, compilers, and various utilities, and tutoring (which i've already done quite a few times), though for that i should really finish up properly making resources rather than scribbling on a whiteboard each time, losing everything each time

@jakehamilton I'm an obsessive self hoster, and have been filling the gaps of my stack where things have been missing.

For the most part, in recent years, this translates to HTTP(S) crawler defense, in the form of iocaine. More recently (as of this morning), I'm also working on a milter, aiming to replace rspamd (which is slop-infected, and a pain in the ass to configure anyway), in a similar spirit to (and reusing parts of) iocaine.

I'm interested in pretty much anything related to self hosting, and making that easier. Like, I wrote a small howto on running Prosody in my homelab, behind a Wireguard tunnel, while still allowing voice & video calls from external networks (by running a STUN/TURN server on the fronting VPS).

If there was such a collective, I'd continue working on crawler/spam defense, and writing documentation about how to self-host this and that without relying on The Cloud™ too much.

@jakehamilton software for the local council, so they could spend taxes on services for local people instead of sending money to Microsoft, oracle etc…

@jakehamilton
What would *I* do? I cant code.
I would use the software if the project is socially cool and the software not too far behind common floss stuff.
I would write bug reports & feature requests & kind words to the devs.

@jakehamilton You'll probably have tons of coders, so even though I can write basically anything back-end/systems related, that should be figured out.

You do need to make tribal knowledge easily accessible. I would write documentation for internal processes and write scripts and tools that make the work easier. Tons of easily composable automations that make the onboarding and development process easy and fun. Remove the error-prone and frustating parts of writing software.

@jakehamilton Still dreaming of an old friends idea: Building a base like an OS that can load different editing capabilities like type setting or image manipulation tools. Not needing to load whole apps, maybe more like a terminal.

@jakehamilton I contribute usually writing because I like it, frugal and affordable monitoring/observability because that's my specialty and "tooling".

these days, I'm also very good at migrations, de-cluttering and moving people out of vendors (de-clouding ;)) to shrink down dependence to the bare minimum.

@jakehamilton great question and Initiative! We're doing this for a couple of years now and love it! Our recommendation is to not focus on the tech but the politics: What are your shared values, how do you want to work together, what would your ideal society look like. This will help find projects you can really get behind as a collective.
Also we have a local first approach, meaning we operate in our city, meet regularly in person and build strong relationships with people/groups we work with.

@jakehamilton This sounds like an amazing concept. I don't have any concrete ideas yet, but I really like the vision and many of the replies that have already accumulated.
Personally, I'd love to see the #FOSS stack for an independent municipality develop and generally software helping to reduce waste, improve sustainability, and foster real community between actual humans. As a software developer, I could help with building the software itself, but also with trying to construct an ecosystem around it (as this is often where the real use derives from) and keeping it well-documented.

@jakehamilton hi I'm a teacher who makes public domain software for teachers about self organising their work and allowing some degree of digital sovereignty... I also write stuff about how DIY more is a good thing.. www.edumentic.com .. I'm just worried that we will all get too dependant on the tech oligarchy and forget we can do a fair bit for ourselves...

@jakehamilton I would work on tools to support a secure, repeatable, automated build & release process

Devs hate that shit and many are convinced AI is gonna give it to them at the cost of a skillful prompt. Nope, it's really neither secure nor deterministic

@jakehamilton I am not a software creator but I am a writer! I would write and edit documentation. I like to make technical documents more accessible for people like me.

@jakehamilton

Clemens and me are so deep into this fedi stuff https://codeberg.org/Menschys/fedi-codebase

[edit]
(by the time of writing codeberg still was out) …

@jakehamilton I'd advocate for user rights, software freedom, digital sovereignty, etc.

I could build any software, given the time, but I have already made a compiler, a text editor, an OS, etc. I'd love to tackle the large stuff that no one wants to chip away at.

@jakehamilton I would probably love writing documentation and tutorials for the software and the group, helping with outreach

@jakehamilton I'm a techie, of which there will likely be too many already in the initiative. But you can count me in.

I'd bring in the skills that made me successful at work, leveraging my decades of software experience: mentoring, helping people see the big picture, building a strategic vision, anticipating the long-term consequences of short-term decisions, API design, versioning, optimization and resource frugality, fighting not-invented-here syndrome.

@jakehamilton

If I were involved, I would bring collaboration skills - things like negotiating plans that everyone can agree on, figuring out together what kinds of mutual support different people thrive on, etc.

@jakehamilton

That is most functioning open source projects.

...anything that needs doing? I would love some deduplication though, I'm pretty sure every second open source project I've seen uses a different framework for UI or math or something.

The problem with open source is that onboarding and documentation is generally not good enough.

Even #linux kind of sort of expects people to study things and "just show up" and "figure it out".

@jakehamilton I honestly don't really know. Right now I feel like I /should/ look more into osdev, but that also kinda feels like a reaction to all of the… everything.

I also think there's a lot of room to make non-trivial network simulation easier/more accessible… (Beyond the "emulate a single switch with maybe a preconfigured NAT-towards-the-physical-network" that libvirt gives you.)

@jakehamilton I work on libraries to allow small IoT devices to communicate securely and interoperably, without using too much power or radio spectrum -- and ideally by default, without inconveniencing user or developer. A lot of that happens in and around the @ariel / @RIOT_OS community, and right now at the #IETF #hackathon.

@jakehamilton If I had time (which I don't): Write a GUI framework similar to Iced.rs for Lean4, to make it easier to write GUI applications in that language.

@jakehamilton meatspace community building/organising tools

@jakehamilton Having no coding experience, but wordsmithed a bit while getting a Journalism degree, I figure I would gravitate to tech writing. Or janitorial.

@jakehamilton Yes! I want this.

I really want to build programming environments for people who don’t consider themselves programmers, but still deserve the tools and principles that we know to work. (Think “what if spreadsheets, but workable at a large scale”.)

And all the things that’ll get us to that point. A language, editor, runtime…

@jakehamilton I would (wish to) contribute thinking about how to make it work even into the deep future, to make it resilient to changes in underlying technology while being able to take advantage of potential future technology developments.

We write software for the present, but it lives in the future; and the longer it can continue to work well, the more value it returns to society.

(Of course, I am assuming this is #OpenSource #SoftwareLibre )

@jakehamilton My most realistic answers:

1. A visual-functional programming language "Alonzo" aiming to be intuitive enough to compete against vibe coding.

2. If my concept for mobile typing proves usable, I'd want to build a dumbphone around it. I'd need help with the hardware-side here!

And yes, I'd love to see others' ideas for a better computing future! I'd enjoy chipping any needed optimizations.