TL;DR: the community will move to Discord in order to make internal development discussions publicly viewable. Prospective contributors can request writing permissions. Join at https://discord.gg/bECy4Hd. Telegram and Mattermost will remain live for until further notice.

What’s happening?

At the Crown community meeting in Malta it was decided that, in order for Crown to make an important step towards full decentralization, internal communications channels should be publicly accessible and readable by the entire community. Furthermore, consensus was reached that prospective contributors and active community members should be facilitated in providing more direct input and feedback towards development, marketing and other relevant processes that previously took place behind closed doors. This is one in a series of steps that will make the development process more transparent, along with making the GitLab workflow public.

We think this change to our workflow will bring major improvements to our efficiency and, more importantly, bring in additional talent from the outside. To this end, we have been steadily redesigning our Discord server, which you can join here!

I want to contribute!

By default, the contributor’s channels are read-only. If you would like to actively participate and contribute to the development of Crown, join our Discord server and shoot one of us a message. Roles will be decided upon democratically and granted at the discretion of contributors at that moment.

Why Discord?

In its four-year lifetime the Crown project has always striven to host an open and accessible platform for its community. Long-time community members will recall that the project has therefore cycled through various forums, chat apps and platforms as its main hub for the community and developers to come together and discuss. In early 2017, it was finally decided that the community would start using Mattermost — an open-source, self-hosted chat platform with many similarities to Slack — with the underlying intention to keep implementing new features as they came out and to make it a place to call home. Although it has been a comfortable home for many, the improvements Mattermost have offered appear to have been fewer and less refined than those of its competition. Furthermore, the sign-up to Mattermost seemed to be a large barrier for many prospective community members. Consequently, these combined factors stunted the growth of the community and efficiency of the development team.

The development team felt that it was important to move to a platform with more refined permission settings, better functionality and a lower barrier of entry for new community members. Welcome Discord!

NB: For the time being, our Telegram and Mattermost servers will remain live.

We hope to see you there!

The Crown Development Team

https://discord.gg/bECy4Hd