DAPSI call deadline 20/01/2021

https://dapsi.ngi.eu/apply/

In addition to the full description, here is the information specific to DAPSI.

Milestones

U: User Research, I: Infrastructure, A: Advocacy, O: Operations

Milestone description Date
U1 Prepare the user research, prepare the research sessions, create an intercept interview script M1
U2 Find the user research participants M1
I1 self-hosted development environment and website M1
U3 Conduct interviews with the participants M1,M2,M3
I2 fedeproxy module, fedeproxy GitLab and fedeproxy GitHub, extensive end to end integration tests, documentation M1,M2,M3
A1 Reach out to GitLab implementors and submit merge requests relevant to simplify the implementation of fedeproxy GitLab M2 to M4
A2 Reach out to Gitea to implement a federation data model and vocabulary M2 to M4
O1 Publish fedeproxy software on a monthly basis M2 to M4
U4 Affinity mapping, result analysis, user research report M4
U5 Define the user experience roadmap based on the recommendations from the user research report M4
I5 Create the fedeproxy server M5,M6,M7
O2 Create a hosting environment for running the fedeproxy server M5
O3 Run the fedeproxy in production M7
A3 Reach out to software developers, organizations and forge maintainers M8,M9
A4 Seek feedback from users and modify fedeproxy accordingly M8,M9
A1 Reach out to GitLab implementors and submit merge requests relevant to simplify the implementation of fedeproxy GitLab M5 to M9
A2 Reach out to Gitea to implement a federation data model and vocabulary M5 to M9
O1 Publish fedeproxy software on a monthly basis M5 to M9

The team

Team composition

Name of the person Role in the project CV Entity
Loïc Dachary Developer https://blog.dachary.org/cv/ Individual, France
Pierre-Louis Bonicoli Developer http://libregerbil.fr/CV_Bonicoli.pdf http://libregerbil.fr/Contributions.pdf Libregerbil, France, Coordinator
Loïc Dachary

In 2001 Dachary raised concerns about centralized proprietary forges and worked with the Free Software Foundation to setup, install and maintain the Savannah forge. He also contributed to the GNA! forge, until 2017, when it shut down. In the recent years Dachary published software to migrate software projects from GitHub to GitLab and infrastructure as code including GitLab deployment Ansible playbooks as well as end to end integration tests for a Django based API server including the automated installation of a GitLab server for the duration of the test.

In 2018 Dachary closed his GitHub account for ethical reasons and has since been unable to participate in Free Software projects hosted there. The federation of forges would allow him to reconnect with these projects.

Pierre-Louis Bonicoli

Libregerbil is a french Free Software service provider founded in 2015 by Pierre-Louis Bonicoli, a Python developer with 10+ years of experience. In 2020, Libregerbil improved the support of GitLab within Zuul, a continuous integration project and added support for the Fuga OpenStack provider to the Enough project. Libregerbil has a long track record of contributions to the Ansible project. Bonicoli runs a redmine instance and mades some minor contributions to the codebase.

Team motivation

Loïc and Pierre-Louis would both use fedeproxy and contribute to its development if it already existed, on a volunteer basis, because they need it for their day to day work. But the initial effort to create fedeproxy from scratch cannot conveniently be done on a volunteer basis and requires funding. In addition, because Libregerbil is a Free Sofware service provider, the expertise developped while creating fedeproxy may generate additional income in the future, if a market for the development of federation features emerges.

Value for money

Entity Name of the person Person months
Libregerbil Pierre-Louis Bonicoli 4.5
Loïc Dachary 4.5
Total 9

The costs are calculated on the basis of a 3,000€ net income per month per person, which is well below the average salary for a developer residing in Paris France. The net salary is approximately 55% of the gross salary (retirement plan, social security, unemployment fund etc.) paid by the company. Each participant must attend three face to face events for which the location is unknown: the travel budget includes them. The structure overhead is 20% (administration, management, accounting, etc.). Each total is rounded to the lowest thousand.

Cost category Libregerbil Loïc Dachary Total Amount (€)
Personnel 27,000 27,000 54,000
Travels 4,000 4,000 8,000
Structure overhead 6,000 6,000 12,000
Total 37,000 37,000 74,000

DAPSI_proposal_fedeproxy_Call2.odt (41.1 KB)

The document above, with comments and suggestions.

DAPSI_proposal_fedeproxy_Call20210117.odt (45.9 KB)

  • Proposal Title: A federation proxy for software development forges
  • Proposal Acronym: fedeproxy
  • Keywords:
    • Decentralized solutions
    • Permissionless innovation
    • Empowerment and self-determination
    • Software Engineering
    • Services & Applications
    • Resilient Robust & Dependable
    • Sustainability
  • SUBDOMAIN & SCOPE: Service Portability
  • Does the project contain a relevant research component: Yes
  • Does the proposal include work dedicated to technical development (software/hardware development component)? Yes
  • You are applying as: a group of individual(s) and organization(s)

I added some comments.
DAPSI_proposal_fedeproxy_Call20210117.odt (46.9 KB)

1 Like

Here is the final version, ready to be submitted.

There are a few advice that were not followed:

  • Adding URLs to academic research on the subject. I’m not aware of any and it is doubtful they will actually be used. There is a research requirement in the call and that may be a problem. However the “user research” part is genuinely research in the sense that we don’t know in advance what we’re going to discover.
  • Re-using the language of the call to facilitate the evaluation from the experts. I was just not able to do that without distorting the content beyond recognition. The upside is that the ideas easier to understand. The downside is that an examiner tasked to tick boxes on an evaluation form will have to figure out which part of the project relate to which box because the project description won’t contain the exact same words as the box description.

For the record, it looks like there might be a competing proposal:

There is a limited-time opportunity for this work to be submitted as a grant to the NLNet folks via the NGI Search & Discovery grant (5-50k euros) or DAPSI grants (50k+ euros?). There is never a guarantee a grant will be selected to receive money, but given the slate of other Fediverse projects that have gotten funding via the NGI S&D, I think this is a great exercise. There is the possibility that the EU will extend certain NGI funding periods for further cycles, but it is not guaranteed.

Concretely, would need 1 or more Gitea community member volunteers interested in taking the lead on those. I personally am applying separately for other projects, so I don’t have time / energy to push this aspect forward, but happy to provide guidance where possible.

For the record, here is the message @pilou and I received yesterday.


Dear applicant,

We would like to inform you that we are still working on the evaluation and the selection of the high number and high quality submitted proposals. We expect to notify all applicants about the Open Call results by the end of this month (March 2021).

In case we do not meet this deadline, we will inform you of the new expected date for the announcement of the results.

Thank you very much for your patience and understanding,
The DAPSI team,

The following was received March 23, 2021 and went right to the spam box, as well as the reminder sent on March 26, 2021. Luckily @pilou caught the reminder and we confirmed our participation.

Evaluation Summary Report
DAPSI 2nd open call

From [redacted]

DAPSI Project Coordinator

Zabala Innovation consulting

Paseo Santxiki 3 bis, 31192, Mutilva, Spain

Applicant:

Loïc Dachary

Subject:

DAPSI 2nd Open call

Proposal code:

OC2-102

Dear applicant,

We are reaching out concerning your proposal for the above-mentioned call.

We are pleased to inform you that your proposal has been favourably evaluated by the DAPSI project evaluators. Consequently, we wish to invite you to the preparation of the sub-grantee agreement and access the DAPSI programme.

Please, find below the evaluation summary report (ESR), based on the comments and opinion of experts that evaluated the proposal for DAPSI project:

  1. Call fit (Yes/No)

Yes

  1. Substantial R&D activities (Yes/No)

Yes

  1. Excellence & Innovation

Score (0,00 - 5,00) - Threshold 3,00

4,42

  1. Expertise and excellence of the proposed team

Score (0,00 - 5,00) - Threshold 3,00

4,67

  1. Project planning and value for money

Score (0,00 - 5,00) - Threshold 3,00

3,75

TOTAL

Score (0,00-15,00) - Threshold 12,00

13,08

Comments from Reviewers

Excellence & Innovation:

Very niche project on joining SW forges (read/write to both forges at the same time & easy migration possiblities) where Open Source developers could be very happy with such a SW component. Valorisation potential is debatable. Federate across Github, Gitlab, and other forges, using ActivityPub. Excellent plan! On topic.

Expertise and excellence of the proposed team:

Two man project with the necessary skills to do it. Team already worked on similar projects during the last couple of years. Motivation sounds convincing.

Project planning and value for money:

Work plan with accompanying milestones is credible but should be more elaborated on though. Good value for money. Travel costs (both men work & live in France) are very high. Furthermore, the 20% overhead needed for two indiviuals is not justified. The plan is detailed and convincing.

Status:

Over Threshold

Please confirm your interest by sending a response to dapsi@ngi.eu. Should you fail to confirm your interest within seven (7) days, you will be discarded from the process.

Yours faithfully,

DAPSI Team

https://dapsi.ngi.eu/

dapsi@ngi.eu

Unless I’m mistaken, we are at the 3.2 NEGOTIATION PROCESS stage of the Guideline for applicants. Since we are in different administrative situations (you are employee of a company, I am an individual) the requirements are different. @pilou Do you foresee any delay in obtaining the required justifications?

I’ll collect the information required for me, that is:

  • A copy of the ID-card or passport
  • A proof for every participant in the project that (s)he is legally established and working in an eligible country

Mail received today:

Dear applicant,

After receiving your confirmation to get involved in DAPSI project, the negotiation phase starts.

The objective of the negotiation is fulfilling the legal requirements between DAPSI consortium and every selected project of the call. This is previous to the official involvement, that will be formalized with the signature of the subgrantee agreement. In the case of applying as consortium, all the partners will sign it.

To exchange all the information in this phase , you have a shared folder in OneDrive (do not send it by email). The main contact of your organisation in the proposal will receive and invitation to OneDrive soon. You can request access for more persons in your entity if you consider necessary. If you do not receive the invitation in 24h, please, let us now.

In this negotiation process, some administrative information to fill the sub grantee agreement is needed, you will find an excel file in the shared folder with the information needed for each project partner and the contract draft for your review.

Moreover, in this process, the DAPSI team will verify the status information of all the beneficiaries. For this, you should provide:

For legal entities:

Legal existence: Company Register, Official Journal and so forth, showing the name of the organization, the legal address and registration number and, if applicable, a copy of a document proving VAT registration (in case the VAT number does not show on the registration extract or its equivalent)
In the specific case of enterprises: Additional documents to prove the SME condition. There are two ways of verification:
  1.   If the applicant has been fully validated as an SME on the Beneficiary Register of the H2020 Funding & Tenders Portal, provide:
    

a. A screenshot of the PIC number in the Portal where the “VALIDATED” status of the company is evidenced

b. A screenshot of the SME status in the Portal (it will be valid if it is from 2020 or 2021)

  1.   If the applicant has not been fully validated as an SME on the Funding & Tenders Portal, the following documents will be required to prove the status as an SME:
    

a. SMEs check list: signed and stamped. The template provided includes the headcount (AWU), balance, profit & loss accounts of the latest closed financial year and the relation, upstream and downstream, of any linked or partner company. (Template available in OneDrive folder as explained below).

Any other supporting documents will be requested in cases where the information is not clear for the verification.

In case of natural persons (individuals), that do not participate as a legal entity:

A copy of the ID-card or passport of participant(s) in the project team will be required.
A proof for every participant in the project that (s)he is legally established and working in an eligible country

Timeline:

Documents requested above provided by 7th April
Digital Contract sent to you for signature by 14th April
Deadline for the contract to be signed by all the parties by 21st April
DAPSI – Round 2 Kick Off Meeting 23rd April 

Yours faithfully,

The paperwork was received, I’ll spend some time this afternoon to provide the requested information.

Documents are uploaded to cloud.fedeproxy.eu.

TODO for @dachary

  • :white_check_mark: Updated DAPSI_Administrative\ data.xlsx
  • :white_check_mark: DAPSI-Call1_Bank details_template.docx filled, signed and exported to DAPSI-Call1_Bank details_template.pdf also added a bank statement to the NATURAL PERSON DOCUMENTS folder
  • :white_check_mark: Documents (ID card photo, proof of employment, proof of residency in France) in the NATURAL PERSON DOCUMENTS folder

TODO for @pilou:

  • :white_check_mark: Update DAPSI_Administrative\ data.xlsx
  • :white_check_mark: Documents for SME in the LEGAL ENTITY DOCUMENTS folder

TODO once all documents are complete:

  • :white_check_mark: Upload the documents to DAPSI

All the documents have been uploaded by @dachary.

I updated DAPSI_Administrative\ data.xlsx and provided the following information:

  • “DAPSI-SME-Checklist” (signed and completed)
  • bank details (signed) and bank statement
  • K-Bis
  • Mémento fiscal (TVA number)
  • registre des bénéficiaires effectifs
  • Certificat inscription SIRENE
1 Like

The paperwork was acknowledged to be complete (no missing document) today.

For the record I asked a friend for documentation regarding how to properly declare to the French IRS the money that will be received in this context.

Received today:

Dear all,

After receiving the administrative data requested to you, we are preparing the final Sub grant agreements to send them for their digital signature. We have not received comments from your side in relation with the content of this agreement (it is in the shared folder) so we assume you agree with it and we can start with this signature process.

In the coming days you will receive an automatic email from our administration colleague (redacted name) in name of AdobeSign Titled “Signature requested on……” You just have to open that document and there will be indicated with arrows the different places where we need your signature. Just click there and write or paste an image of your signature. If you have any doubt during the process or you don’t receive that email between tomorrow and Thursday please let us know.

Thank you and best regards,

Received today:

Hi team!

I’m (redacted) from F6S, the DAPSI partner responsible for Communication & Dissemination activities.

We want to make sure that our teams get all the visibility they deserve, as soon as the kickoff meeting takes place. With that goal in mind, we will need you to provide us some information that will be used to publicly promote your project in DAPSI’s communication channels (e.g. website, social networks, press releases, blog posts, etc…). The use of this information will be limited to the scope of the project.

I’m attaching the template detailing all the information, images and logos required. Could you please send me these until the end of the week (April 16th)?

Feel free to contact us if you have any questions regarding the requested information.

Thank you!

DAPSI-Communication_template.docx (2.6 MB)

@pilou the document is in the dapsi/communication folder in Nextcloud. Could you please fill the blanks with your informations?

I filled the blanks and added one photo and a logo (horizontal and round).

Could not https://chat.fedeproxy.eu (or https://lab.fedeproxy.eu) be used for Project’s social media accounts ?

1 Like

Good idea! The chat is better than the lab IMHO.