This announcement is surely one of the most important news of 2023 : Automario will leave the CHATONS collective.
Since my adhesion in June 2020, I tried to take some time to make the collective work, especially with my role in the mediation team of the collective, and to improve it. I was really happy to be one of the collective's members. The first CHATONS camp (an event looking like a summer camp) in 2021 gave me lots of energy and motivation to keep me contributing to the collective. The discussions I had with the other members and the interoperability test between Matrix and XMPP have been really important for me.
However, I have felt lots of pressure and stress and I think I can not give as much time as I could before. This situation has made me to stop temporarily my activities inside the collective, as you can read in this public post (in French). In parallel to that, you must note that I manage Automario alone and this work is time-consuming. I could of course ask for some help, but I think this platform, and by extension myself, needs to focus on one essential thing : to provide services reliably.
I took a break to think about my individual impact in the Open-Source world and the CHATONS collective in general. In my opinion, the collective suffers from several problems as other structures :
- The members' diversity, which is a good thing and a bad thing at the same time, since not everyone has the same level of requirements.
- Some rules to become an active member are hard to follow and even some current members are not following them entirely
- Some members don't have the same rhythm or don't have the same tolerance to the new candidatures, a point that I can understand to some extent.
I know that all the members are doing an incredible work for the collective, and it is not an easy task, but I think this project doesn't follow my personal goals anymore. I would like to thank everyone sincerely for their help and good-will!
However, this will not mean the ending of Automario itself, neither the ending of my contributions. I recently joined the team of a small French ISP, and I am lucky to participate in a local hacker space. I am thinking about new ways to contribute to the projects I like. This is just a transition to do bigger and better things in the future, and it means a lot to me.
To finish this article, I am sending you a good coffee or a good tea!