Website is now live, https://suf.one – more details there and the rest of this README is just me thinking out loud.
Design drafts: https://www.figma.com/file/jIubmgm289vAfTuV1I0crg/Suf.one
A cooperative is "an autonomous association of persons united voluntarily to meet their common economic, social, and cultural needs and aspirations through a jointly-owned enterprise" – beautiful! But before getting ahead of ourselves,
Fulfill the digital needs of Muslims through apps that are excellent. We may not work on the largest projects of biggest issues (at least in the beginning), but we are user-focused. We make apps that Muslims want but might not even know it, things others haven't fulfilled.
The excellence we seek:
- Pursuing the best qualities in every app: speed, power and beauty. Ihsan is pursued in every part of the experience.
- Community engagement and open-source: Open-source is so… Islamic! Cooperation between people, sharing progress to the wider world and keeping software open to contributors of all kind to work towards the best software for all.
Community participation is the heart of Sufone: to nurture the ummah's spirit and work together, to develop skills and let contributors have experience in all parts of such a beautiful effort, and to emancipate people from their dependence on software made by companies seeking profit whose work is not released to the public.
A later stage of Sufone will be focused on financially supporting those Muslims who work on open source. Many amazing apps and resources come from people working as volunteers (like quran.com) outside of their full-time job, or are one-man projects! Sufone will collect and distribute funding 100% transparently, and hire people to work on these projects (those who already do and even more people!).
We are highly inspired by Nuqaya and the suite of apps by Ustadh Mustafa 💗
Two divisions working together:
- Project
- Community
The Project team include programmers, designers and all those working directly to build apps and digital experiences.
The Community team is the open channel of the public to send their feedback and struggles to the Project team, and also to communicate to the general public from the Propject team. Includes support, marketing, research and so on.
To start with, people will probably take on many roles across both teams at the same time, and there should always be a lot of overlap and work across teams (specially for roles like writing documentation or blogs). But specialization of skills or at least attention is beneficial for the greater effectiveness.
Of course, this whole vision for Sufone is a quick draft of big dreams… but it's a community project, and I hope others can find the same dream within themselves and we can work towards the same goal 😊