August 17, 2022
Multiple grant applications were completed and sent out to support the Friendly Forge Format (F3) while development continues, primarily on F3 and Gitea federation.
Development
Friendly Forge Format (F3)
During an online coworking session the F3 repositories were reorganized and renamed for clarity, as suggested in a previous meeting. The schema now have their own repository which became a submodule of the repository where the specifications are written as well as the reference Go implementation.
The Go reference implementation is refactored because it was using type parameters in a way that was inconvenient, leading to very long parameter lists.
ActivityPub support in Gitea
Discussions happened on the topics of moderation and representation of avatars (see the task list) and development continues after a pause.
Collaboration
Online Coworking
Two sessions happened (1, 2) and concrete work was done in both cases. Another one is scheduled in a few days and more are expected. It seems to be an effective way to get work done, in particular for people who only occasionally participate because it makes it easier to get up to speed.
forgefed
New properties are discussed as well as the associated behaviors with participation by people from different projects. Although not immediately applicable to forgefriends or Gitea federation, it is a sign of vitality that confirms the revival observed a few month ago.
Codeberg & Gitea
The idea of using Codeberg as a codebase for forgefriends instead of Gitea was discussed and explored. It turns out to not be a viable idea because it is not organized to be reusable by a third party. Doing so would require significant work. The primary incentive for exploring the idea was more social than technical: the governance of Codeberg is closer to forgefriends than Gitea and problems such as project leads with conflicts of interest seemed less likely.
Hostea
There are ongoing discussions for Hostea to provide GitLab hosting in addition to Gitea. It would make for a nice experimental playground for Hostea since they are the first targets.
Diversity
A meeting was organized with three “large” organizations (more than one full time employee is “large” compared to most Free Software projects, including forgefriends). Although it was not recorded notes were taken (in French).
An attempt was made to invite people who are usually silent to speak up, but that did not yield immediate results. There has been less technical discussions than usual lately though and the experiment will continue.
Another meeting will be organized in a few days.
Transparency and funding
All grant applications for F3 were completed and sent out before August 1st 2022:
The RIPE fund was suggested and explored but it is non trivial to figure out if it is a good match for forgefriends.
Compared to the same period in 2021, an increasing number of grant applications were made public. Although they are mostly for NLnet (one for OTF), it is a great improvement over the total absence of publicly available examples in 2020.