Hello here !
Thank you for having me, and I’m gonna give you a long read, too, sorry about that 
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Before I start
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Hi, I’m Pouhiou, employed as a Community Outreach Coordinator by Framasoft
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I’m not a dev so I won’t interfere on technical issues here
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The point of my presence is to answer to all the other points (so @tcit can save his time here to contribute on technical issues)
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I want us all to start this contribution on the same basis, so I’m here to share about what we did/did not do, what we will/will not do with candor, trust and transparency
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Framasoft works as a collective: I might report our exchanges to members of our association (that will respect any privacy you ask from us)
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I choose to pile on this topic so you’ll be able to extract anything you think relevant in the about Mobilizon thread ps.zoethical dot org/t/about-mobilizon/2731.
From what I read here
I’ll try to divide each point and number them for more clarity.
1) Thanks for your concerns
I read here a lot of care and attention to make us feel welcomed, not overwhelmed and not “being talked behind our back”. Thank you all for that, it’s very heart-warming.
2) PeerTube was created where things existed before
According to my experience, saying that PeerTube was “creating something where nothing existed before” is untrue. Before starting on PeerTube, we talked with the teams of MediaSPIP, MediaGoblin (that were already thinking about integrating ActivityPub mediagoblin dot org/news/ ), and we even looked at PopCornTime!
We have also been asked to justify ourselves for not promoting and contributing to d.tube or Steem.it, or for not using IFPS or even XMPP.
3) Framasoft was and is aware of other solutions close to Mobilizon
I feel that there is an asumption that Framasoft didn’t talk with or didn’t know about other solutions for publishing events and group organization. Before conceiving Mobilizon we did our homework. We wanted to contribute to a software:
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that is open to contribution, scalable, and would not have a huge technical debt
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that could be open to become federated by implementing ActivityPub Protocol
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with an economic model that isn’t compatible with surveillance Capitalism
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whitch community would be open to be user-centric
We went around and saw a lot of solutions, we talked with a lot of people (I talked with Demosphere people from Toulouse during an Alternatiba event, and @tcit talked with a Demosphere activist from Liege, and we agreed that with a 10 years old php, and a code that wasn’t on a forge, it would be very difficult to start from it). We also talked (and are still talking) with OpenAgenda people, mainly about standards.
We concluded that there wasn’t a software meeting our requirements (there was GetTogether, but when we went and talked with them, we weren’t on the same page about the core audience and the importance of UX, and their views on potentials economic models didn’t suit us at all).
Actually, we still talk with a lot of people: 3 weeks ago, in an activists conference in Toulouse, I went to participate to an exchange with the coders of Nexxo (who formerly worked on the Communecter project), Transiscope (that aggregate data), and La Ligne Jaune to see how we could work on interoperability (through standards, protocols and even through databases, but that was where I couldn’t follow ).
4) Framasoft wants Mobilizon to be user-centric
When I read
I want to ask: who is this “you” you’re talking about? Who are your users (or the people you want to make a software for)? How do you know their needs and uses? How do you separate your use-bias (we all have ours, no blame from me!) from their use-case?
We asked a UX designer to help us with that, and please trust that Marie-Cécile Paccard did the job: she went and met with LGBT+ communities, Eco-activists movements, and led lots of interviews before we worked with her on such a feature.
But I think it comes from misunderstandings. First, Mobilizon is not a calendar software. We want it to be an alternative to MeetUp, or to ̷̑͜F̸͛̿͜á̴̜͍k̶̡̺̃̈́e̵̲̬̎b̶̹̄̏o̵̖̾͘o̶͘ͅz̴͉̺̈́̀ “Events + Groups + Pages”. Then, the core audience of Mobilizon is not the civil-desobedient-activist who has already taken steps for their privacy. We feel Mobilizon is made for people who wants to organize/participate to a climate march or a “movie+debate” night, and would want to stop using ̷̑͜F̸͛̿͜á̴̜͍k̶̡̺̃̈́e̵̲̬̎b̶̹̄̏o̵̖̾͘o̶͘ͅz̴͉̺̈́̀/MeetUp to do so.
5) How can “multiple identities feature” put projects and communities at risk?
Please educate me. If we need to change something we promised to the people that funded Mobilizon joinmobilizon dot org/en/, I need to be able to understand so I can explain to them. When I read “harm” and “put at risk”, I feel really alarmed and anxious.
If it’s a way to underline the importance of the issue to you, that’s fine (I define myself as a Drama-Queen, I won’t judge). But if we have an oversight on how Mobilizon will create human suffering, I need to understand that urgently.
6) Framasoft and Mobilizon will NOT lead anything
That is really important and our entire team is adamant on this point. We are not a big software company. We are not here to lead your fights even though we share them. Actually, please consider that we won’t be able to do a single thing more that what we announced.
Framasoft has done a lot of things over the last few years. So much so that we now feel the need to close down services to keep our human-scale integrity. We’ve had burns out among our members (including mine) and we will do anything to protect ourselves from injunctions and responsibilities that would eventually lead to more human suffering.
This almost is a trigger to us. iCal is a shit-show and Mobilizon, through ActivityPub, is an opportunity to change that? Great, but that’s your fight, so that will be done on your energy, we don’t have any to spare, we’re truly sorry about that.
There is a need for more interoperability between event-management softwares and Mobilizon is the opportunity to share standards and ActivityPub tips? Of course! But please consider that we will only do our best, don’t put expectations on our shoulders, or they will break and we won’t let that happen ;).
We have promised, during a crowdfunding, to publish a V1 for the 1st semester of 2020. All the energy we have for Mobilizon will go to fullfill this commitment, until it’s done. “All the energy” means one (it bears repeating : 1!) almost-full time-dev, and some colleagues who try to lessen his burden by answering anyone who wants “just to talk” with the team.
So this is a line we won’t cross: we won’t take the lead on anything, nor accept it in any way. If you want help with your fights, let’s talk in the 2nd half of 2020. If you have urgent concerns, we will talk as much as we can, but won’t be able to do the work for you.
7) Actually, Framasoft doesn’t want anything that resemble power
I’m really happy that this discussion isn’t lead or hosted by Framasoft, because it’s not about Mobilizon, it’s must larger than that, it’s about interoperability between event-publishing softwares (please consider opening the category to the public for transparency).
Framasoft is seen as more powerful than we are. To see what we are, we have this data-visualization. We were in the right time on the right place issue, data-centralization. We worked our asses off, developed an approach that worked, and people started to follow us. We are grateful for and humbled by their trust. But we don’t have super powers, and we don’t want them !
Now, there are 35 of us and our services get 500-800 000 users/months (rough and low estimate). It is way too much. We are currently in the process to decentralize this responsibility onto collectives, therefore we don’t want to take more responsibilities such as leading the way to perfect interoperability.
That’s all for me, that is a lot to take in (fortunately p.s. have a meeting with Pyg in a month), but I hope we’ll now be on the same basis.
