Recording of the webinar
For the benefit of people who did not have the opportunity to attend the live event, it was recorded and you can find links to the videos of the presentations as well as Q&A in the agenda. Alternatively you can explore the directory that contains all the material, including recordings, slides, comments, links and notes.
Forge federation: How forge friends want to liberate your code
Webinar, 19 January 2022 at 10.00 UTC+1 https://meet.jit.si/ForgeFederationWebinar
What if you could easily collaborate with any free software project, no matter where it is hosted? Use the Github UI to discuss issues on a remote Gitea code forge project. Send a Merge Request from Gitlab to Github. Have you and your team members, all your project contributors, everyone working from their own favourite environment. Use your code forge of choice to collaborate. Just like you also freely choose your email provider to communicate with others.
This is the objective and vision that the forgefriends community is working hard to realize. Its members, all forge friends, strive to allow seamless interoperability between code forges by adding federation support. Using the Fediverse and open standards such as ActivityPub and DVCS they will enable free software development to liberate itself from centralized platforms that lock projects in with their network effects and FOMO.
In this webinar you will learn about the importance of forge federation, and what it means to be “a friend of code forges”. The various community projects are introduced, with brief explanation how they work and what is on the roadmap. Anyone is highly encouraged to contribute and become a forge friend too. Each presentation is followed by a Q&A session where you can ask the presenter how you can jump in.
No installation or registration is required. The webinar uses Jitsi at https://meet.jit.si/ForgeFederationWebinar
Presentations and Q&A session will be in English, with interpreters made available for participants who feel more comfortable speaking French or Chinese. We ask all participants to adhere to the forgefriends Code of Conduct.
Agenda
- Forge federation: An overview from 10,000 feet by Loïc Dachary (recording of the presentation and Q&A)
- Go-Fed: ActivityPub and ForgeFed foundations in Golang by cjslep (recording of the presentation and Q&A)
- ForgeFlux: Using forge API’s and adapters to interoperate by Aravinth Manivannan (recording of the presentation and Q&A)
- Gitea: Update and plans for adding federation support by techknowlogick (recording of the presentation and Q&A)
- Forgefriends: Contributing an incremental import/export to Gitea by Loïc Dachary (recording of the presentation and Q&A)
- Funding Free Software projects in a transparent way (recording of the presentation and Q&A)
A 10,000 feet view of problems with forge silos and their solutions
By Loïc Dachary - Free Software developer
In this introduction Loïc will tell about the efforts to solve the many problems posed by forge silos. Finding solutions was a long road that started in 2001, It finally led to the forgefriends initiative and a continuation of the work by Gitea to add federation support. The emergence of the Fediverse and open standards are key to code forge interoperability, and Loïc will explain how they fit together and which FOSS projects are instrumental in that.
ActivityPub and ForgeFed implementation in Go: the go-fed library
By cjslep - go-fed Author
Go-Fed is a suite of libraries that lowers the barrier to writing Fediverse apps in Go. Libraries built under the Go-Fed umbrella follow the philosophy of both a tech “stack” with composability of other standards. For example, developers can choose to use a minimal amount of the ActivityPub stack and still opt to compose it with go/fed’s library for HTTP Signatures, or to use the ActivityPub stack without using go/fed’s HTTP Signatures library.
ForgeFlux: experimental federation for software forges
By Aravinth Manivannan - Free Software Developer
A Matrix developer commented that federation is six times more difficult than an equivalent centralized design. We believe this the main reason why federation has received lukewarm responses from forge developers. With ForgeFlux, we are trying to implement federation external to the forge, entirely using the forge’s API.
Our approach involves implementing adapter-like software (called Interfaces) that interact with the forge’s API and a common protocol. In this webinar, we hope give a whirlwind tour of the ForgeFlux architecture and if possible, showcase Gitea<—>Gitea pull request federation(WIP, at the moment).
Gitea and federation update
By techknowlogick - Gitea owner
Gitea ongoing effort to implement federation started in 2016. It was never a priority but got funding from NLnet in 2022 and individuals from the forgefriends community in 2021. Learn more about what was done and what will happen this year.
Contributing an incremental import/export to Gitea
By Loïc Dachary - Member of the forgefriends community
Gitea currently implements a migration feature that allows to move projects from GitHub, GitLab, Gitea etc. It can also be useful to mirror the project as a whole, including pull requests or issues. But this is an all-or-nothing proposition: if the migration fails it has to start over and do it all over again. An incremental import/export feature would allow to resume an interrupted migration where it was interrupted. This flexibility would also allow mirroring a project as a whole (not only the repository but also issues, pull requests, etc.), an feature required by federation. In order for other forges to re-use this work, the file format used to provide this feature will be documented and maintained in a backward compatible way. It could be used as a foundation to continue the development of the forgefed vocabulary.
Funding Free Software projects in a transparent way
By Someone from the Karrot team
During the summer of 2021, the Karrot project prepared a grant application and were inspired by the one published by the Inventaire project. It was then decided to share the details of the Karrot grant application in the same way in a forum category dedicated to funding. Other projects also published the details of their funding in a radically transparent way. During this lighting talk the rationale for such an unsual approach to transparency will be explained, in the hope it will be useful to other Free Software projects.
Simultaneous translation technical notes
- Everyone is connected to the same room
- Before starting the meeting participants that will benefit from simultaneous translation will say so
- Everyone lower the volume of the participants that will benefit from simultaneous translation to be audible but not understandable (less than 20%)
- The that will benefit from simultaneous translation lower the volume of the translator to be audible but not understandable (less than 20%)
This short video is a visual aid to explain how to lower the voice of a participant to the conference for simultaneous translation purposes. In this short video one person starts to speak Hindi and a few seconds later another one starts translating. The two voices overlap which is distracting. The listener prefers English and lowers the voice of the person speaking Hindi using the slider that shows in the menu that appears when clicking on the three dots next to the speaker avatar.
When the translator speaks, everyone hears a faint voice from the participant being translated and hears the translation instead. The participant being translated faintly hears the translator but is not disturbed because the volume is too low for them to understand.