DRAFT: monthly report, April 2021

Bonjour,

Here is a draft for the monthly report to be published April 27th, 2021. Feel free to edit/add, it’s a wiki :slight_smile:

Cheers


The past weeks were mostly focused on User Research activities and discussions on how fedeproxy should move forward. A monthly event was scheduled to discuss this activity report and anyone interested is welcome to join the first event.

User Research

User research preparation and interviews are well on the way:

Going back to how User Research was planned last month, it looks like the following steps will be completed by the end of May 2021:

Which leaves us with the last part:

Pierre-Louis Bonicoli and Loïc Dachary will participate in the affinity mapping but two more participants are required to provide a diverse perspective. Hopefully that can be completed mid June the latest and tell us in which themes fedeproxy should focus on.

Technical infrastructure

A self hosted technical infrastructure was created, based on Enough, with a chat room, a forum, a static web site, a Nextcloud instance, a GitLab instance together with a CI able to run two GitLab instances for integration testing. The current fedeproxy server code does not really do anything useful at the moment and the goal was merely to prepare the ground for developers to start working on an implementation.

Communication and branding

The goal of fedeproxy is: “forge federation” but what it means exactly is yet to be discovered which makes it quite difficult to communicate about the project itself. For starters, the fedeproxy name is not a good one: nobody can guess what it is about when they hear about it and it is difficult to remember. There was brainstorming to pick a new one and CoderGlue is a better candidate: it even triggered interesting discussions on what it means to mix federation and Free Software development. It is also non trivial to explain the problem fedeproxy is trying to solve to a non technical audience but a 3 minutes pitch came out of it. There is room for improvement but it’s a start.

Loïc Dachary mastodon account was used to announce the fedeproxy project and call for testimonies to get more material for User Research. There was some interesting feedback that is yet to be compiled. And someone suggested it would be better to create a mastodon account dedicated to fedeproxy going forward.

Last but not least, it was decided to host a monthly event, starting April 2021 to discuss what was done in the past month. It is a useful addition to this monthly report and a way for people interested in fedeproxy to connect together.

Diversity

Fedeproxy is not immune to the lack of diversity that can be observed in computer science. The only way to fix this is by starting right at the beginning. Efforts are currently made to reach out to people who are usually under represented: this is an ongoing effort that needs daily attention.

Transparency and funding

The funding category of the forum had all expenses and donations from the beginning. With the DAPSI grant it became inconvenient to manage it within a forum topic and a spreadsheet was created.

The liberapay account is up but it is still unclear how it should be used and promoted. An anonymous donor pledged 5,000€ to fedeproxy a few days ago and it may be donated on liberapay. Who will receive the money? On what should it be spent? That will be a discussion for the coming weeks.

For the record, the final version is now here.