August 2020 Update

It’s hard to believe it’s been three months since we launched the Zinc Community program! During that time, our focus has been moving Convene forward and to redistribute the wealth we capture. With July’s patronage payout, we hit our first milestone in our strategy for a post-scarcity society. 

In August, we began stage two of the Zinc Community program: Continuous Education. We are now offering bi-weekly group-coding sessions where we focus on Test Automation. Each session starts with a check in of name, pronouns, what we’ve been puzzling over.

From there CJ, Tom or I pick a piece of Convene that could use more test automation and work through it as a group. We take it slowly, asking and answering questions, and following our curiosity. 

If you would like to join in, hit us up at [email protected]!

Project by Project Updates

Convene

Colombene, Vivek, Tom, CJ, and I have been focused on infrastructure improvements and taking a deeper look at the goal of Convene. One thing we realized is that trying to match Zoom or Clubhouse or other platforms “feature for feature” was outside of our ability to execute on. Instead, we took a step back and began honing into our core value proposition: making space. So much of our time, attention, and energy is spent in toxic or hostile spaces. Convene creates space to be present, free and supported. 

Some other cool things:

• Colombene put together this incredible experience brief for Convene. She also made these wireframes to give us a clearer target of what we’re building for Convene’s Workspace experience.
• Vivek ran three volunteer usability studies and began a conjoint analysis. If you want to participate in one (and earn some patronage points!) send an email to [email protected]!
• CJ and Tom improved the screen sharing experience.
• We cleaned up the README a bit, added an admin panel for managing Spaces and Rooms, tripled our server capacity, and made a number of improvements to the developer and test infrastructure to mitigate surprising regressions and improve confidence when we pick the project up after setting it down for a bit.
• Tom, CJ, Myself and our first cohort of test automation explorers automated a number of feature tests!

Moment Park

• Cricket confirmed that ShakeIt Photo runs on iOS 14, and has prepared a release for TestFlight if any of y’all want to play with it!. 
• We also put together an architectural direction for managing so many filters across so many apps. And we’re beginning to explore applying it in PlasticBullet.

Support

Support has been on the back burner for the past 6ish months. It’s been hanging out, forwarding emails from cold lead contact forms for a while. We’ve gotten a bit of interest in templated responses to inbound emails and a help-desk but don’t have the capacity to build them out. We also got a lovely contribution from Carol!

That’s all for now! Take care of yourselves out there, so you can support those around you in taking care of themselves.

Zee and the Zinc Stewards, Maintainers and Contributors.