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cross-posted from: https://piefed.zip/c/foss/p/1548253/we-are-trying-to-grow-a-new-foss-collaboration-community

A few of us have put together a forum and wiki in the hopes to build a community focused on collaboration for various open source and creative commons projects. We build the platform a few months ago, but haven't done the greatest job of actually spreading the word and building up the active members, so I'm posting in another attempt to try and spread the word to establish some activity for our community.

In short, the idea behind our website is to:

  1. Build a community that is based on genuine connections and collaboration. Our community is a forum and wiki, and hopes to steer towards a slower (and possibly more old school) type of internet - and away from some communities that are mostly article reposts and memes.
  2. Libre/foss/creative commons/etc - we want to help generate community that can come together to work on projects that benefit everyone, and in a way, push back against some of the urges of capitalism.
  3. Involvement - we want to welcome everyone, but the idea is to eventually create a culture where people are not afraid to contribute small things to many projects. We want to motivate individuals to grow the foss ecosystem without feeling like they need to commit heavily to any one project. Projects can get rekindled and improved on even if others have abandoned it.

Overall, we have a big vision for the community - but at this point we are just trying to get it off the ground and are looking for members to sign up and start some discussions to help us grow.

The goal is to create a community that is able to stand on its own, and outlast myself or any of the other admins. And essentially become a commons space, with the current admins simply acting as a steward that can be replaced if they need/want to step down. In that respect, we hope to get some members and allow the community to grow and evolve the platform to fit the needs of the community.

While modern social media has its place, we felt that the current standing of online collaborative spaces were limiting and often highly niche. We hope that maybe we can grow a space for people of various skills, backgrounds, and ideas can come together to create a creative and productive space - and make some lasting connections as well.

I know this post got a bit lengthy, and many will probably skim over it, but if it's something that sounds interesting to you I would really appreciate it if you came over and checked it out, signed up, and maybe help us get some discussions going to help us grow our community. And of course, if you would be so kind as to helping us spread the word, it would be greatly appreciated - as we spent so much time working on building the site, but none of us are all that great at actually "marketing" the community to actually find new members.

Our forum is: forum.UnfinishedProjects.net

And our wiki, where we hope people will actually build out various projects together is located at:

UnfinishedProjects.net

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[-] uuj8za@piefed.social 4 points 5 days ago

Does UnfinishedProjects have a stance on AI? Are AI tutorials OK to post? Is AI slopware OK to post? Are AI answers to skill exchange posts OK to post?

Might be worth mentioning that somewhere on the site.

[-] UnfinishedProjects@piefed.zip 1 points 1 day ago

Copy paste from another comment asking about LLM/AI use:

For a more detailed writeup on our current views: https://unfinishedprojects.net/wiki/About/Ethics

But in short, we don't want to dictate the parameters for each project, and want each project to set their own requirements. We do have a "notice"/"banner" on the wiki that we ask people to utilize for each project to be clear and transparent about their requirements for AI/LLM use in each project.

[-] uuj8za@piefed.social 1 points 17 hours ago

This is an area where we want to be honest: we don't have clean answers, and we are not going to pretend otherwise.

AI tools including language models, image generators, and code assistants, are genuinely useful. They can help someone start a project they wouldn't have had the skills to begin otherwise, prototype ideas quickly, and finish projects that might otherwise be abandoned. Even the UnfinishedProjects platform likely wouldn't have come to fruition without the assistance of LLMs.

At the same time, the ethical picture is genuinely complicated. Large AI models have been trained on vast amounts of creative work scraped from the internet, including work released under open licenses, without meaningful consent from the people who made it. The legal landscape regarding AI is unresolved and messy at the time of writing. In addition, there are broader ethical concerns regarding the impact of data centers on local communities, the environment, and the economy. In short, the ethical considerations are vast and widely recognized.

The current landscape has left the broader community divided on the ethical and legal implications of using AI in their work. There is no single policy that we can implement on our platform to align with everyone's views, and we believe the best way forward is to allow each project to determine its own boundaries regarding AI.

Individual projects set their own AI policies. We do not mandate a platform-wide rule on AI use, because the right answer genuinely varies by project type, contributor values, and context. Every project is encouraged to state its policy explicitly using the Template:AIBanner at the top of its project page. By being direct and upfront about AI use, you provide transparency for each contributor, allowing them to make an informed decision about whether to participate right from the start, rather than uncovering that information later.

The quality bar does not lower just because a tool helped. In our view, pasting unreviewed and/or an untested output is not a contribution. Reviewing, editing, testing, and taking responsibility for the work — that is the contribution. The tool is just the tool.

We expect this area to keep evolving, and our thinking will evolve with it. As with the rest of our wiki, we expect these pages to grow as members bring more insights to the table and as the technological landscape shifts.

this post was submitted on 03 Jun 2026
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