Turn communities into something more than tags

[Changaco]

At least in the UI, but probably also in the code. Background: gratipay/gratipay.com#3127.

[Changaco]

I've changed my mind on this, let's upgrade communities instead of downgrading them, and put tags into profile statements.

I want communities to be sort of like Ruby Together (found in @nayafia's TL), but with users deciding directly where the money goes. The community managers only manage suggestions and news, so there's no need to set up a legal entity, which makes it a lot more convenient.

The problem of open source isn't only funding, it's also communication, it's a fractured community in which information doesn't circulate as well as it should. Let's try to fix both problems by providing a funding+communication tool to that community.

[Changaco]

We don't want to reinvent the wheel, we don't want to try to replace existing channels of communication, we want to make something useful that doesn't really exist elsewhere. Liberapay is about funding great stuff through donations, that should be the focus of our community features.

Here are my ideas:

• implement community metadata: logo, short description, links to official sites and communication channels
• implement community newsletters: there can be more than one per community, users can subscribe to the ones they like, each community has a semi-automated one managed by the Liberapay team
• implement community news boards: where users can submit their projects, post status updates, and ask for donations (should probably do Implement "projects" #77 first)
• implement moderation of news boards: there can be more than one team of moderators, users can choose which ones they trust, the default ones are Liberapay's site-wide team which will only filter out spam, and a second one whose original member is the creator of the community
• show relevant abstract pledges (Implement abstract public pledges #47) on the community page

That's a significant amount of work, and I don't want to delay the launch, so I think for now I'll do this:

• modify the code so communities have a creator
• implement community metadata
• put a message on community pages explaining that they're still under construction
• allow users to sign up for the soon-to-come newsletters
• replace the leaderboards with a simple log showing new members
• show relevant abstract pledges (Implement abstract public pledges #47) on the community page

[Changaco]

In an answer to a comment on LinuxFr I used the word "ecosystem" to describe the intended scope of our "communities", we may want to change "communities" to "ecosystems" in the UI.