Noise

This post was syndicated from: Diaspora* and was written by: maxwell. Original post: at Diaspora*

… is over on our devblog. Be sure to check it out!

<3

Maxwell

This post was syndicated from: Diaspora* and was written by: maxwell. Original post: at Diaspora*

Wizard hat supplied by ohaibbq

Rosanna Yau is Diaspora*’s new “Design Wizard.” Rosanna has actually been around Diaspora* since the early days, making bodacious hashtags and our original logo which you can see on our stickers, t-shirts and front page. She is going to be focusing how to make the beta of Diaspora* more beautiful, usable and fun. Rosanna is a practicing graphic and interaction designer and a faculty member at the California College of the Arts here in SF. When Rosanna isn’t hacking on D*, you can find her skating around The Mission, designing all the things, teaching people young and old about fonts, colors, zines, skateboarding, and eating bugs.

Rosanna:
on Diaspora rosanna@joindiaspora.com
on IRC: rosanna
on the web: http://rosannayau.com

This post was syndicated from: Diaspora* and was written by: maxwell. Original post: at Diaspora*

Great News.  Sean Tilley started this week as a Diaspora* intern!  If you have been on Diaspora for awhile, you might recognize Sean as an old friendly face from Diaspora’s early days, helping people get acclimated and helping make Diaspora a friendly place™.

Sean is going to be a swiss army knife of an intern, tasked with keeping our  developers and community at large in communication about whats going on. You can look forward to Sean blogging, profiling on new contributors, keeping our issue tracker tidy, and showing off upcoming features and ideas kicking around the Diaspora-verse.  Please join us in welcoming Sean!

You can find Sean on Diaspora*:

deadsuperhero@joindiaspora.com

and IRC:

DeadSuperHero

This post was syndicated from: Diaspora* and was written by: maxwell. Original post: at Diaspora*

If you have been following our GitHub recently, you might have noticed we have a new team member here at DiasporaHQ! Dennis Collinson comes to us from Pivotal Labs, the industry leader in agile software development. Pivotal specializes in building great engineering team by focusing on good agile process and clear communication.

Dennis brings this know-how to the Diaspora* team, and is hell-bent on whipping our development process into tiptop shape. You might have also noticed him helping us clean up our Pivotal Tracker and Github issues to streamline communication with our developer community, and provide more transparency to our development process.

photo by Dot

His official title is “Chief Engineering Witch”, so lets give him a very spooky HOLLA.

You can talk to Dennis…
on IRC: denniscollective
on Diaspora denniscollective@joindiaspora.com

This post was syndicated from: Diaspora* and was written by: maxwell. Original post: at Diaspora*

The past few weeks have been pretty crazy for us here at Diaspora*. It is unbelievably painful to lose such a close friend and collaborator as Ilya, and we want to thank our countless community members, friends, family, and professional contacts for all of your support as we try to take care of ourselves and plot a course for Diaspora*’s future. We are forever grateful to the amazing community of people who have stepped up to help us get things back in order.

Of course, the next logical question is, “where do we go from here?” After long discussions with each other, people close to us, and members of the Diaspora* community, we have come up with a plan to get our beta out the door by early 2012.

In preparation for the beta release, we are focusing on three main areas the next few months:

1) Focus on our priorities with the help of our engaged community.

We have a tight schedule to meet, and want to get the most done we possibly can, so we need to prioritize our tasks in order to make Diaspora* as awesome as possible. Given our limited time, we have had to to make tough decisions as to what are the top priority issues.

Many of our community members have stepped up to help us out and focus on these priorities:

• Elizabeth Stark, TH Nguyen, Jon Pincus, and volunteers from Stanford have been working on a clear, simple, and transparent Privacy Policy for JoinDiaspora.com, and are gearing up to engage the privacy and Diaspora communities in the process. (Watch for a blog post about this very soon.)
• Dennis Collinson, Mike Sofaer, and Sarah Mei have been continually speeding up and cleaning up the code-base.
• Dan Hansen has been moving the ‘stream’ to javascript templates.
• TH and David Kettler have been conducting usability testing and meetings at Noisebridge, and helping us distill the issues that arise to actionable steps.
• David Morley (maintainer of Diasp.org) has been staying on top of the mailing list answering people’s questions.
• Countless other community members have stepped it up, such as Pistos, gzruy, mrZYX, RichardTE and D_Group, submitting tons of pull requests, updating our wiki, and making Diaspora* more developer-friendly.

We want to thank these people directly. We could not do it without them. They inspire us to continue, and are important part of the development of Diaspora*. Which brings us to our next important step…

2) Expand our team and community.

Currently Diaspora* Inc. consists of Daniel and Maxwell as full-time team members, plus Raphael and our former NYU advisor Evan Korth on our board.  We are incorporated as a for-profit C corporation, and we are a mission-driven company first and foremost – more on that below.  We have been working on Diaspora* full time since of June 2010, and have found ways to forego stipends or salaries since July 2011. We will continue to work on Diaspora full time while we find additional funding. Since July, we have used donation funds only to pay for JoinDiaspora.com, other community resources, and to pay Peter Schurman for his help with communication and fundraising. Peter has also contributed invaluable time and energy helping us think through our next steps. We currently have funds on hand which we are going to use to ramp up to the beta launch, improve community communication, and improve the on-boarding process and feedback loop for Open Source developers.

Over the coming months, team expansion is one of our top priorities. We are currently looking for interns, and will be hiring full time developers and a community manager next. Interested in working with us?  Check out our internship postings, or email us at jobs@joindiaspora.com.

On the community side, we’ll be organizing a series of hack days over the next couple of months, so please sign up via our meetup page to get notified about events in your area. The first of the series will take place on Sunday, December 11 in SF. We would love to see you and hack some cool Diaspora* stuff for the day, and this would be great way to get to know us if you’re interested in joining our team.

And you don’t need to be a coder to get involved in our community. There are lots of ways to contribute, from translation to evangelism to designing to hosting a pod. Want to join the movement? Here’s how you can get involved.

3) Become a sustainable organization.

We are lucky to be able to work on Free and Open Source Software full time. The fact that we have been able to do this so far only through funds raised via donation is a powerful statement.  It has allowed us to focus on laying the groundwork for an open and free social web.

Looking forward, however, if we are to engage more people to fully commit to Diaspora* and compensate them for their contributions, something we see as a requirement to make Diaspora* a success, we need to expand our sources of funding. We are working on ways to generate additional funds to give us the bandwidth to hire more developers, further engage the community, and match the rapid development of closed networks. We will keep the community posted as this process evolves.

We can assure you that any funding solution we go for will never betray the trust you have placed with us, and our ongoing vision of privacy, openness, and ownership of your data. This vision is why we started building Diaspora*, and it is still our number one commitment.

Diaspora*’s mission as a company is to build tools to help people get control of their data and do fun things with it online. It’s about giving users ownership and control over what they share, and creating amazing things. It’s about promoting Diaspora* open source software to everyone, because we think this is the right thing to do. A new social web model where users are not the product, but willful participants who are creating new modes of communication. This was our vision when we launched our Kickstarter campaign in April 2010, and it remains our vision today.

Maxwell and Daniel

December 7, 2011

As always, you can help us build a better social web by donating or by helping us out with some code.

This post was syndicated from: Diaspora* and was written by: maxwell. Original post: at Diaspora*

This weekend we lost one of the brightest minds of the technology world, and one of our best friends. Ilya Zhitomirskiy was a crusader—or, as he called himself, a Dragonslayer—for freedom, privacy, and openness on the Internet. He believed in the power of technology to make the world a better place. And through the creation of Diaspora, he did.

His passions were infectious. His parties epic. He “dreamed a better, freer future, and threw himself completely into building what he dreamed.”^[1] The thousands of tweets and hundreds of news articles reporting his passing are a testament to the influence of his words and the strength of Diaspora’s vision. “Every time I saw Ilya, he had a new plan to save the world. He was optimistic without irony.”^[2]  It pains us greatly that we will no longer be graced by the bright-eyed idealist in the American flag shirt making us all believe in the open web.

As Ilya himself said, “There’s something deeper than making money off stuff, being a part of creating stuff for the universe is awesome.”

While his life ended, his vision and passion live on. The world needed his voice. We’ll miss you Ilya.

There are memorials planned for Friday, Nov. 18  in San Francisco, and Sunday, Nov. 20 in Philadelphia. In life, Ilya brought people together. In death, he would have wanted the same thing. Everyone is welcome.

If you would like to speak, share a memory, or anything else, please email us at remembering_ilya@joindiaspora.com 

In San Francisco
On Friday November 18th, from 5-8pm PT

McAvoy O’Hara
4545 Geary Blvd
San Francisco, CA 94118
(map)

In Philadelphia
On Sunday November 20, at 3pm ET

First Unitarian Church of Philadelphia
2125 Chestnut Street
Philadelphia, PA 19103
(map)

In lieu of flowers, donations may be sent to:
“Ilya Zhitomirskiy Foundation”
PO Box 30551, Philadelphia, PA 19103

Donations will go to tech-minded organizations and projects such as:
Lower-Marion School High School Robotics Club, Freedom Box Foundation, and EFF.

[1] Mike Sofaer
[2] Karina van Schaardenberg
Photo credit: Matt Nuzzaco

This post was syndicated from: Diaspora* and was written by: maxwell. Original post: at Diaspora*

Hey Everyone,

We are happy to announce that DiasporaFoundation.org is now live. DiasporaFoundation.org will be the home of the Diaspora* project, a place where our community can share information, learn about cool new features, and information about where they can get an account.

This new blog (DiasporaFoundation.org) replaces blog.joindiaspora.com (WordPress FTW), and will be updated with news from the community and announcements from the core team.

Thanks for hanging with us!

Ilya, Daniel, Yosem, Peter, Sarah, and Maxwell