Soft-launching Clojureverse.org

In the coming days and months, this forum will be re-launched as Clojureverse.org.

The mission of Clojureverse is to create an independent space hosted by the community itself, which Clojure-related projects and groups can use to host mailing lists.

The old-fashioned mailing list has been a pillar of many open source communities for decades; unfortunately the leading open source software, GNU Mailman, is stuck in the early nineties. The most popular alternative, Google Groups, is hosted by a massive corporate entity with dubious intentions.

What we need is an alternative that is, and remains

  • free and non-commercial
  • managed by and for the community
  • retains history so no knowledge is lost
  • is crawlable by search engines
  • can be used like a traditional mailing list
  • has a modern web UI

This is what Clojureverse aims to provide. Individual projects and groups can get a separate category (subforum), with an associated email address, like chestnut@lists.clojureverse.org.

This initiative fits into a personal decision to step away from consultancy and dedicate more time developing open source, and supporting the community. I will launch a Patreon campaign in fall to fund the operating costs of this forum and to support my own open source activities. You can expect full transparency in how this community is run, technically, socially, and financially.

Should this ever grow big enough to warrant its own legal structure, I intend to take inspiration from BeWelcome/BeVolunteer, with baked in guarantees that the organization stays non-commercial.

In the coming days we will transition to the new domain, and start updating branding and descriptions to reflect the new mission. We will reach out to project maintainers, local communities, study groups, and creating mailing lists for those that want them. The official launch with much pazaz, stickers, and a small launch party at the Berlin Clojure meetup, is planned for the first half of September.

The move will be transparent, all content will move along, existing URLs will redirect, and existing accounts will continue to work.

1 Like

Cheers~

from http://clojure-china.org/