MCOSI Meeting Briefing – January 25th 2020
The Minds Community Open Source Initiative (MCOSI) held its latest meeting on January 25th. This meeting was attended by Luculent, Medworthy, Realmindschan, Censorshipsucks (members of the MCOSI core team) Nick (Minds administrator), Nemofin (Minds developer) and Xander (Minds quality assurance director), as well as Chrisdoogood and the meeting was viewed by several other members of the community.
The meeting included a range of topics, which began with a discussion about changes to the registration and on-boarding process, which include the upcoming implementation of captcha and e-mail verification procedures (re: Gitlab epic: #88 and Gitlab issue: front#646). We then had a discussion regarding improvements to both on-site search engine optimisation (SEO), the usage of 3rd party search engines (ie. Bing, Google, DuckDuckGo, Startpage etc) and related server side rendering techniques. Currently, Minds content can easily be searchable via the usage of the DuckDuckGo and Bing search engines (further development to incorporate Minds based content into other search engines is expected to be completed over the next several months. This will allow easier accessibility to community members content. For further information, please refer to Gitlab epic entries: #85 and #94).
We continued the meeting with a discussion about the Canary service (Canary provides community members with a preview of upcoming improvements and is provided to allow members to experiment and provide feedback. See Minds “More Transparency - Introducing Minds Canary & Gitlab” blog article for further information). Minds development team is also considering implementing a new testing procedure which will also allow for easier rollback of code if necessary (further information can be found via Gitlab issue: engine#966). This new procedure includes a software development kit (named: Unleash), which is intended to be licensed as an independent open source product, which will then be available to be downloaded and used by interested community members and 3rd party developers. Xander continued with providing an explanation regarding the quality assurance procedure, which starts with him monitoring the development process and then testing code before said code is implemented into Minds. Some of this code becomes available to Canary members, in which members can provide further feedback and identify any issues. Once the new code has been tested, it is then implemented into the production environment and becomes available for all community members to use.
The meeting continued with a discussion regarding the jury system. The jury system is currently being improved and further information will be provided within the near future (Gitlab epic: #117 provides links to further Gitlab tickets, which references upcoming changes to the jury system).
The meeting concluded with a brief discussion the Trust Tree Traversal (T3) project. T3 started as a hackathon project (an event in which a group of developers collaborate intensive work on producing software projects) and is currently a stand-alone, independent project. Recently there has been concerns raised by several community members regarding the implementation of T3 into the Minds platform, the MCOSI has been assured that there are currently no plans to implement T3 and this project is in a very early stage of development (T3 has not had any further development since the introduction of the project, which was published in September 2019).
Minds Community Open Source Initiative and Minds Inc. welcomes constructive comments, suggestion and opinions from the wider community. The MCOSI encourages Minds community members to actively participate within the development and support of the open source Minds social media platform.
References & Other Resources:
* Minds Community Open Source Initiative
* Data Science / Dev Coordination Epic
(Gitlab Roadmap: Epic#88)
* Implement Captcha
(Gitlab Ticket: Front#646)
* Recommendation Engine
(Gitlab Roadmap: Epic#85)
* Search (UX)
(Gitlab Roadmap: Epic#94)
* Implement Our New Unleash PHP SDK To Minds
(Gitlab Ticket: Engine#966)
* (Jury) Moderation
(Gitlab Roadmap: Epic#117)
* Trust Tree Traversal (T3)
(Gitlab Repository)
* More Transparency - Introducing Minds Canary & Gitlab
* MCOSI Meeting Agenda – January 2020
* Minds Community Open Source Initiative First Anniversary
* Introducing Minds Community Open Source Initiative