Interim Fandom Coders Congress

This repository serves as an informal, interim site of discussion for the Fandom Coders community on topics of interoperability, decentralization, and federation.

The proposals in this repository are of an experimental nature and make no guarantees of fitness for any purpose. Implementers must make their own determinations regarding when a proposal is “mature” enough for implementation.

About Fandom Coders

See https://fancoders.com.

About this Repository

This repository constitutes a site of discussion which is both interim and provisional, with the goal of allowing interoperability work on fannish projects to make progress in lieu of more formal mechanisms.

This repository is under stewardship of kibigo!, and it is expected that all contributions conform to the Fandom Coders community guidelines and code of conduct (at present these are the same as the Bobaboard Expectations & Code of Conduct).

Process

This process is very informal and decentralized; anybody can submit a proposal, and any proposal with interoperable implementations (from within the Fandom Coders community) will be upgraded to implemented/ status.

In a future, non‐provisional, non‐interim Fandom Coders Congress, there may be specific requirements on proposals in order for them to be accepted, or there may be additional stages for distinguishing when proposals are “ready for implementation” versus not. For the time being, this is left to the discretion of implementors and proposal authors.

1. Someone (“You”) comes up with an idea for some technology or protocol with interoperability requirements between implementers. You discuss this idea with people in the Fandom Coders community through some channel, for example the Fandom Coders Discord or the Discussions on this repo. You decide that the idea has enough merit to justify further exploration.

2. You write up your idea as a Markdown document and submit a Pull Request to this repository to add it to the proposals/ directory.

   If you need help doing this, reach out!

   Proposals do not need to be “complete” to be accepted, but they should at least clearly communicate the problem which is being solved and a general approach for arising at a solution.

3. If your proposal is deemed “in scope”, it will be assigned a number of the form IFCC-#### and merged into this repository.

   Proposals are “in scope” if they have relevance to fannish projects and have some kind of technical interoperability requirement. These terms are interpreted loosely.

   Examples of proposals which would not be considered “in scope” are proposals which do not pertain to technology or proposals which only have relevance to a single fannish project.

   If there is an obvious forum which is “more appropriate” for your proposal, we may suggest that you make your proposal there instead.

4. Further discussion on the proposal can take place through the Issues, Pull Requests, and Discussions of this repository. These discussions should note the number of the proposal to make them easy to find.

5. One of the following happens :—

   1. Your proposal is implemented in such a way that two or more services (websites, technologies) are interoperating using it. At this point, the proposal is moved to the implemented/ directory to signal that further work needs to be done in co·ordination with existing implementations.

   2. It is decided that your proposal is a bad idea and should not be implemented, for example because of security or ethical concerns. At this point, the proposal is moved to the withdrawn/ directory to signal that implementers should not attempt to implement it.

6. Further work on the proposal may still occur after the proposal has left the proposals/ directory, bearing in mind the considerations above.