Forge federation webinar preparation

I’ve had a few calls in the past many days at 4am (my time), due to EU/CN timezones, and I’m not keen on repeating it, my apologies. I already get no sleep as it is :laughing:

I’d be happy to pre-record something, and if any Qs come in beforehand I could answer them too (or afterwards as well).

Edit: aha, I didn’t see that second post of yours come in as I was writing this, yes pre-record would be very much preferred :slightly_smiling_face:

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Fantastic! I’ll be able to address some of the Q, I suppose. And forward the others to you to be answered asynchronously.

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Announced the webinar today in the OpenSourceDiversity forum in a thread where mentioning the presence of French & Chinese interpreters seemed relevant.

https://forum.forgefriends.org/t/proposal-dispursing-sponsorship-funds/548/2

Asked people from Karrot if they would be willing to speak about funding in a transparent way.

https://matrix.to/#/!hLvyfFiEgExICCPsSm:matrix.org/$Xpngvjr3Nf2BSYei5FfXTh10wMF-Iy3OuQIfljHEIpY?via=matrix.org

The agenda is ready. More speakers can be added at a later time. Now reaching out to each speaker to ask them to proofread the summary.

@realaravinth ping
@cjslep ping
@karrot ping

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@techknowlogick I wrote a quick summary that should (hopefully) reflect the lighting talk you are going to record during 5 minutes for the webinar. Would you be so kind as to proofread it? You can either edit it youself to fix/add whatever you’d like. Or I’d be happy to edit for you.

@aschrijver I wrote a short presentation of the webinar and would very much appreciate your opinion.

Yes, I will have a look. Note that you have to lock that wiki post topic if you want subsequent edits to bump the topic to the top of the list (and even need to delete the “topic closed” entry from the thread or it will still not bump.

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(I locked the topic and linked to this thread for discussion)

In my first feedback on the idea for a webinar I mentioned “Selling the vision of forgefriends in a way that truly excites people, and entices them to cross the treshold and become part of this community”. Since then I’ve spent a lot of time on imagining that vision, and recent developments (#socialcoding and #forgeflux and thinking how ForgeFed fits in) are great opportunities to organize around that vision.

But I don’t want to force the vision upon any of you. They are just my thoughts and arguments, and they need to be broadly “shared” before we can carry it forwards. Since that is not yet the case I cannot recommend improvements for alignment to this vision, so will restrict to reflections on the current draft text.

I reckon that the text is meant to be spread around in the webinar announcement. My first impression is that the text focuses too little on ‘unique selling points’. I would make the intro a bit longer and the text under the agenda points a bit shorter. And avoid many of the hyperlinks in them.

Since my approach is so different than yours, I am starting to feel bad about once more suggesting significant changes :sweat_smile:
But anyway, here goes… an attempted rewrite of the first 2 parts of the webinar. No need to adopt any of it, just use whatever you like.

From

Webinar: What is going on with forge federation?

It is possible use Thunderbird to send an email to someone using OutLook or Gmail. But it is not possible to file a bug report on the Go language without creating an account on GitHub and agreeing to the Terms of Service. Various organizations and individuals are engaged in a collective effort to address the problem of forge silos and provide solutions to the problems they create.

This free online is organised by the forgefriends community on:

January 19th 2022 at 10.00 UTC+1 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.

Agenda

A 10,000 feet view of the efforts to solve the problems of forge silos since 2001 - Loïc Dachary - Free Software developer

SourceForge could not export/import sofware projects in 2001 and Gitea, GitLab or Github still have a long way to go to allow their users to seamlessly move their projects around. With ActivityPub came the idea of federating instead of importing and exporting. The Forgefed project started to define a vocabulary to support notifications between forges. Although still in their infancy, some libraries such as go-fed, natively support ActivityPub and Forgefed. Some well known forges such as Gitea or GitLab discussed the idea of implementing federation during years, without concrete progress. More recently the forgefriends and ForgeFlux projects started working on a proxy that would run independantly of a forge and transparently enable federation. Some of these projects received funding and there is hope that Gitea will be funded in 2022 to work on a native federation implementation. There is much to do and if someone has time on their hands, they can join the effort and start immediately.

To

Forge federation: How forge friends want to liberate your code

Webinar, 19 January 2022 at 10.00 UTC+1

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. It’s 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 ends in 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 our Code of Conduct.

Agenda

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.

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This is perfect :+1: I would not change a word, much better than what is there now :100:

You know that you can add youself to the agenda to speak about your vision, right? I don’t mean to be pushy (because I already asked you twice) but I also want to make sure there is no misunderstanding :slight_smile:

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Thank you :grinning_face_with_smiling_eyes:

I have decided I will not present at the webinar. There’s too many things that I don’t know about how I’ll commit my time in the coming year.

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For archive my notes for the webinar. Turns out the summary I initially wrote is useful to rehearse the 5 minutes talk on that topic :slight_smile:


A 10,000 feet view of the efforts to solve the problems of forge silos since 2001 - Loïc Dachary - Free Software developer

SourceForge could not export/import sofware projects in 2001 and Gitea, GitLab or Github still have a long way to go to allow their users to seamlessly move their projects around. With ActivityPub came the idea of federating instead of importing and exporting. The Forgefed project started to define a vocabulary to support notifications between forges. Although still in their infancy, some libraries such as go-fed, natively support ActivityPub and Forgefed. Some well known forges such as Gitea or GitLab discussed the idea of implementing federation during years, without concrete progress. More recently the forgefriends and ForgeFlux projects started working on a proxy that would run independantly of a forge and transparently enable federation. Some of these projects received funding and there is hope that Gitea will be funded in 2022 to work on a native federation implementation. There is much to do and if someone has time on their hands, they can join the effort and start immediately.

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The agenda was edited (cosmetic) to make it final (no more wiki) before it is advertised. It can be changed to add new presentations but they would need to be confirmed with a proper summary and not in a draft state to not confuse the reader.

The funding talk has no names for the speaker because there was no feedback from Karrot. If it turns out they are not willing to present, I will prepare something. I’m motivated to cover this important topic rather than just not discuss it.

Draft of a toot announcing the webinar.


You are invited to attend the webinar on #forge #federation to learn how forge friends want to liberate your code, featuring #Gitea, #ForgeFlux, #Forgefriends, #GoFed:date: 19 January 2022, 10.00 UTC+1 at https://meet.jit.si//ForgeFederationWebinar

Do you know what @Gitea does to further federation? Or why @Forgefriends & @Forgeflux work on a file format? Or that the @GoFed has native support for #ForgeFed? Or how forge federation got funded in 2021?

This is your chance to learn more, don’t miss it :smiley:

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Good announcement! The only change needed is #GoFed instead of #go-fed (as dashes aren’t supported). Also capitalizing words in hashtags works better for screenreader accessibility. I think #Forgefriends and #Forgeflux are okay though. #ForgeFed might be better than #forgefred.

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I changed it to follow your recommendations :+1: I also had to cut around 130 characters. Is it still ok?

You might make it a 2-part toot. There is a lot of information in it now that doesn’t speak to people who haven’t heard of the projects before. So you can have a 1st part similar to the intro text to the webinar, and then follow with project details in the 2nd part.

Hum, I don’t see how to reword it to be shorter though. The first paragraph announces the event, lists the projects involved and the date/place. The second paragraph is a teaser regarding what to expect in each project. If I had to rewrite that for people who never heard of these projects… it would have to be something entirely different. I can try to give it a shot, if I got your suggestion right. If I misunderstood what you suggested, would you be so kind as to explain again?

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It is just an addition. With 2-part toot you have 1,000 chars. Move the agenda part to the second toot, and an intro after “…liberate your code”

What about sending this one as it is. And send another a few days later with a different content announcing the event again (maybe calling for presenters). And yet another a few days later to suggest people ask questions in advance. I get that a toot will be missed and needs to be repeated but for those who catch one toot, I can’t figure out why it would be necessary to trim essential information.

That being said… it just shows my deep lack of understanding of how to communicate on social media :blush: It is likely that if I saw examples of what you mean I’d agree immediately.

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