First, recap: what is #JupitersGhost ?

Jupiter's Ghost is a community drive, creative commons cc-by-sa licensed podcast about the crew of a deep space vessel in the distant future.

It's supported by an in character social network and some other stuff.

Think Star Trek, but actually centering community values and not centering the military. It's the culmination of years of work, and something I've really cared about for a long time.

It's also probably the most popular thing I've ever personally done, with the first episode clocking in well over 30k downloads so far.

You can listen to our first two episodes at https://intergalactic.computer or wherever you find podcasts.

Those episodes are old now, becuase I had too many other things on my plate to give the show the love it needed to keep happening. First, my work commitments skyrocketed and consumed most of my free time, and then I quit my job and spent a year overhauling and rebuilding our businesses.

Along the way, several of my core contributors also had radical upheaval in their lives and ... well, next thing I knew two years had passed.

We have most of episode 3 recorded and I could probably edit it and release it, but I'm not happy with it.

I'm not happy with it becuase it's all my ideas. It is good, it is funny, but it's also basically entirely things that I wrote, and it features fewer external contributions than the first two episodes.

There is room in this show for me to write plots and scripts and, frankly, I'm good at it. I'm funny, and people like the things I write.

But my goal isn't to write this show, my goal is to write @jandrews and to have the rest of the show grow organically. This can and does work, but we don't currently have a good system for collaboration.

The existing infrastructure is a WordPress site with bbpress and buddypress and a groups plugin and ... I mean, it works but you'd have to be very highly motivated to deal with it becuase it is Messy and Conplicated and Fragile, and it's missing some important stuff (like the ability to share audio clips!)

It's too complicated. It needs to be simpler.

Simpler to interact with. Simpler to understand. Simpler to get started. Simpler to participate.

We need a wiki, we need storage, we need a place to plan episodes and a place for players/participants to leave story hooks for one another.

We have a matrix room and a goto social server. I want there to be a forum, but I don't think bbpress is the answer and maybe the forum just needs to be the matrix room.

I don't know, but I am figuring it out. I'm exploring different technological solutions, but I am also embracing the idea that no given technology solution will be sufficient.

Which brings me to our immediate next steps:

Immediate next steps for #JupitersGhost

I'm looking for crew members for the Jupiter's Ghost.

I'm looking for people to run other settings. ( see https://intergalactic.computer/social/ships-and-settings/ )

We're organizing on matrix right now, but I'll be setting up a standing video call for Sunday evenings (5:30 eastern) for new contributor onboarding and episode planning.

If you want in to either thing, hit me up.

I'm also looking at setting up a mail server or an allow-list fediverse server for planning in place of a forum.

We'll do account generation by invite and by hand, rather than through an automated process. We'll set up a wiki in a git repo and build the wiki from there.

There's no need for us to be clever. I'm putting people into places where there used to be technology.

We'll also open things up for more single person episodes and focus a little less on the Big episodes. The Big episodes will come out when they come out. The little episodes will happen a lot more often.

So, if you're looking at the state of the world and wishing to escape to a far future where these problems are history, and instead we have entirely new problems, reach out.

Learn about what we've done so far at https://intergalactic.computer/social

But this is a community project. Bring yourself, bring your stories, consider me a facilitator (and not a producer/director/etc.) It's not *my* story. It's for everyone. There's room for everyone.

Why should Gene Rodenbury and George Lucas (and Paramount/Oracle/Larry Ellison and Disney) control our vision of the future?

Why should Larry Ellison get to decide which stories are real Star Trek and which ones are illegal?

Why should Bob fucking Iger have any say about who can and can't tell stories about the jedi?

Fuck that.

Culture should belong to communities, and that's why I started #JupitersGhost and the #solarFederation

This is your opportunity to tell the stories that matter to you and the people you care about.

You don't need my help or my permission, but I am offering both. CC-BY-SA