Welcome to FISSION Fragments #2 - our weekly links roundup. Want to get them delivered straight to your inbox? Subscribe! We also tend to tweet a lot of these links from our Twitter account @fissioncodes if you want to get them in real time.

This week's links look at Open Source maintenance, how communities and project owners can better coordinate, as well as some content from around the decentralised web, including a self-hosted resource list.


FISSION Fragments #2

An article from Chris Siebenmann titled "Go is Google's language, not ours" digs into the tension between the community of a widely used language and its corporate maintainers.

... in short, Go has community contributions but it is not a community project. It is Google's project. This is an unarguable thing, whether you consider it to be good or bad, and it has effects that we need to accept. For example, if you want some significant thing to be accepted into Go, working to build consensus in the community is far less important than persuading the Go core team.

IPFS .JS has a new release.

Do as little as possible: An oldie but a goodie from Lyza Danger Gardner, relaying her experience transitioning from web development to mobile platforms and back again full circle. Related to present day, how can distributed technologies operate in trusted environments? What does the gradient between trusted <> permissionless look like?

Interested in self-hosting? Then look no further for resources and inspiration. This massive compilation from Edward Dickson should keep you occupied for quite a while: Awesome Selfhosted:  "a list of Free Software network services and web applications which can be hosted locally." Some of the software examples include: analytics, email, resource planning, and much more.

header image from "The rise of few-maintainer projects"

A sobering look at "The rise of few-maintainer projects" by Nadia Eghbal. "As casual contributions—coordinated by a handful of maintainers—become ever more prevalent, how should we reset our expectations for OSS?"

Introduction to SourceCred: "an open-source technology for organizing communities."

SourceCred’s approach is to allow communities to create and curate contribution networks. A contribution network is a representation of how contributions are connected to other contributions, to members of the community, and to the community’s values. The contributions can be imported automatically from sources like GitHub, Google Docs, and Medium, or they can be manually provided by members of a community.

Photo by Bailey Zindel on Unsplash