A little commentary about the beliefs I laid out:

The first belief establishes what a community should be about (and what it should not be about). We want to support a wide array of communities, but not ones whose beliefs are fascist / racist / trans/homophobic / misogynist etc. This was the most succinct way I could find to summarize the problem with those beliefs — they create artificial divisions based on innate qualities and restrict personal choice.

The second is about how power structures influence everything we do. A major shortcoming I see in software today is the default of a top-down hierarchy being the only way permissions etc work, which is mimicking authoritarian power and influences how people self-organize. DEIA is the antithesis of that, and a guide on how to move past that legacy.

The third is an idea I've been considering in many contexts — work, community, friendships. Trust is the core fabric of any group, and there's no shortcut to it. So, the idea we can fully automate a community into existence with AI or similar tools isn't just doomed to failure, it's missing the point entirely.

Fourth is a hard lesson I learned from managing Vanilla Forums for so long and being embedded in the WordPress ecosystem. Community management is its own skill, and the overlap between that skillset and product/programming skills is incredibly narrow. We need to build a system that stands on its own and collaborate on a core feature set that cleverly solves many uses without creating an overly complex plugin soup system that breaks in unexpected ways. It's much harder to gain traction this way, but I now believe a plugin system limits your upside & cripples sustainability after you do.

Finally, we're Web-based software first and foremost, and we need to lean into open standards & privacy. Everything I have done to the contrary in my career (Facebook Login, Google Analytics, myriad vendor API integrations, platforms with no migration path away, and so on) I've eventually come to regret. Let's put a stake in the ground and say "do it this way" so we're clear about that risk.

Now let's do the mission!

Agorakit offers...

• a complete toolset — We want to offer a solution that solves the whole organizing problem, not just the discussion part.
• for a community to effectively self-organize — We want to empower individuals to lead, not a top-down approach.
• that encourages cohesion — We're helping a group stay aligned both culturally and in their goals.
• at a sustainably small scale — "How does this scale to millions of users?" It doesn't, because a community cannot do that.
• while supporting continuous change. — Community must always change! Members leave, new folks arrive, and priorities shift.
• It supports good governance — Governance is a key problem in the open source software industry, and I think we could help with that.
• by providing strong individual & group protections, — I think it's important to call out that needs of the individual & group must be balanced, not always prioritizing one over the other.
• enabling emergent leadership, — Finding new leaders by giving them something to be the stakeholder of is a key way you can enable a community to grow and change.
• and facilitating group alignment & mediation. — Avoiding policing language and encouraging group-based conflict resolution is sorely absent in much software design today and I think it's long overdue.