Received today. As instructed I won’t discuss it outside of this topic: this is one step forward, which is good news indeed. But this is not final and some administrative steps are required and it is entirely possible that there is a blocker.
From: nlnet
Subject: Good news about your proposal to NLnetDear Loïc,
you applied to the NGI Assure open call from NLnet, round August 2022. Currently a selection of the projects is pending the final stage review by an independent review committee to validate their eligibility, and we are happy to inform you that this includes your project “Friendly Forge Format (F3): an Open Standard for secure communication between software forges” (2022-08-025). Should your project pass that final hurdle (which under normal circumstances it should, but please do not seek external publicity until it is officially confirmed), the selection will be made public and we will contact you for some checks and subsequent negotiation of a Memorandum of Understanding. The final amount of the grant will be determined at that point.
We will then also need to share some information about the project both with the general audience and with the European Commission. In the interest of time, we ask you to prepare a one paragraph management summary of the project. For examples we refer you to NLnet; NGI Assure
We kind request you to send us this summary as soon as possible.
If you meanwhile have any questions, please let us know.
Kind regards,
on behalf of NLnet foundation,
From: loic@dachary.org
To: nlnet
Subject: Re: Good news about your proposal to NLnetHi [redacted],
Thanks for the good news
Here is the one paragraph management summary, just in case all goes well:
The Friendly Forge Format (abbreviated F3) is an Open File Format for storing the information from a forge such as issues, pull/merge requests, milestones, release assets, etc. as well as the associated VCS (Git, Mercurial, etc.). F3 is designed to exchange the state of a software project between GitHub, GitLab, Gitea, etc. for backup, mirroring or federation. F3 is essential for a forge to provide key requirements. (i) Portability: the entire state of a software project can be dumped and restored at a later time, on a different development environment (ii) Versatility: when published and updated as a F3 archive, a software project effectively is Open Data on which an unlimited range of applications can rely, even outside of the forge domain (iii) Consistency: it provides a common language to use when talking about the forge related domains (iv) Trust: cryptographic signatures on each F3 dump guard against malicious or unintentional tampering that could compromise the integrity of a software project.
I keep my fingers crossed and hope there won’t be unexpected problems!
Cheers
From: nlnet
Subject: Re: Good news about your proposal to NLnetHi Loïc,
Thanks for the good news
thank you very much for the summary, much appreciated.
We will keep you posted on the outcome of the external review committee.
Meanwhile, take care and bon appetit!
Best,