EmDash, Long-Term: Building Through Community

[CacheMeOwside]

Hey everyone, 👋

This is not urgent, but I wanted to share something with the hope that we can sustain our momentum and energy over the long run.

I've been contributing to EmDash for a while now, and have been thinking about what makes a CMS survive long-term. WordPress may not be the best CMS out there, but I believe it's still here because of its community. The product matters, and the people around it matter just as much.

I have a couple of ideas on how we could build and sustain a stronger contributor community alongside the engineering work. WordPress does this well through structured, punctual, and recurring collaboration, like their scheduled Slack meetings with clear agendas and shared vision.

Here are a few ideas we can consider:

1. Bi-weekly issue scrub on Discord/Slack: Maintainers & contributors triage issues together, label priorities, and loosely align on priorities for the next release. Not expecting anyone to commit to deadlines (I know that's unrealistic for open-source contributors with day jobs), but just having a shared big picture.

2. Pre-release testing sessions: Before a major release, we can have a coordinated window where people, including non-technical users like editors and content creators, can try the new features/fixes, and flag anything that feels off. This gives people who aren't writing code a meaningful way to contribute, and gives maintainers extra eyes on real-world usage.

Why this matters:

CMSes come and go. The ones that stick around are the ones where people feel ownership and connection beyond just using the product. If we set a vision to build a community that nourishes both the product, and the contributors, that will help EmDash not just survive, but thrive.

Looking further ahead

When EmDash grows even more, we could explore local meetups too. Networking, sharing ideas, bad coffee, and a whole lot of live demos. The whole experience. Just planting the seed here.

Would love to hear what fellow EmDashers think, especially from the maintainers on what would be helpful.

[ascorbic]

Hi @CacheMeOwside,
I like this a lot. I think some sort of regular thing on DIscord would be good, though I'm not sure how it would work best. Any idea welcome.

[MA2153]

Discord has native "events" capability that supports recurring events. You just create a voice channel then a recurring event.

[CacheMeOwside]

+1 to @MA2153's suggestion.

Discord's Scheduled Events seems like a good way to get this rolling. We can schedule an event for a text channel.

I'd also love to help with issue triaging, and do a first pass on reproducing bugs, adding labels, flagging critical issues and duplicates, so our scheduled sessions can be focused.

It would also be useful, if we can create a project board (or milestone view) so there's a shared place to see what's planned, queued, or blocking. I'm happy to help here as well.

Also, it would be great if we can announce the recurring sessions on the Cloudflare blog to reach a wider audience (technical folks and also content creators/editors), to make these sessions sustainable in the long-run.

[masonjames]

I'm pumped about emdash's prospects and would love to participate here as well.

[ascorbic]

Ok, this is great. Let's make this happen. As always with these sort of thing, timezones are our main enemy here. The best solution there is usually to alternate times, but mid afternoon UTC is usually the best compromise.

@CacheMeOwside you seem to have the most well-formed ideas on this. What sort of structure do you think would be best for the first one? Discussions? Reviewing PRs and issues? Live coding? Planning? A mix?

[Rimander]

Excellent initiative. I believe focusing on community organization is the right path, as it is a fundamental pillar for the success of any open-source project.

It would be valuable to analyze the strengths and weaknesses of WordPress. This would help us establish a solid and transparent roadmap, building confidence for those considering EmDash who need clarity regarding the platform's future.