(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
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
- Forgefriends: An overview from 10,000 feet by Loïc Dachary
- Go-Fed: ActivityPub and ForgeFed foundations in Golang by cjslep
- ForgeFlux: Using forge API’s and adapters to interoperate by realaravinth
- Gitea: Update and plans for adding federation support by techknowlogick
- Gitea: Contributing an incremental import/export to Gitea by Loïc Dachary
- Funding Free Software projects in a transparent way by ???
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.