What roadmap for Gna! in 2023?

Running Gna!
#1

Bonjour,

And happy new year :tada: I’d like to discuss what Gna! will be in 2023.

A lot has happened in 2022:

  • The idea was born in March 2022
  • A MVP was published in July 2022
  • A business model and a governance was finalized in September 2022
  • Plans were made to implement the business model by the end of 2022
  • The Gna! collective is composed of four organization (Easter-eggs, Libre Solutions, Bearstech and Webarchitects) and one individual (myself) and is a member of CHATONS

While there is clarity about what Gna! is and how it can be implemented, there has been no activity in the past three months. I don’t think it is a problem for anyone involved (please disagree if it is :smile: ): there is no time pressure. This business model will still be good for next year. I would not dare say it is going to be good long term because so much can happen. But if the last twenty years (when SourceForge was created) taught us something when it comes to forge hosting, it is that the landscape changes slowly.

What will happen in 2023 mostly depends on who is available to work on it. There is much potential: members of the collective may get funding to dedicate full time employees, individuals can volunteer or get funded by grants. But there are only two concrete commitments for 2023 at the moment:

  • Easter-eggs has funding for @rlaguerre up to 1 day per week and @natct on occasions
  • I have funding for up to 2.5 day per week

The areas of expertise where each of us will contribute are:

  • @rlaguerre devops (for instance provisioning a libvirt hypervisor)
  • @natct organizational (for instance setting up meetings or managing the CHATONS membership)
  • @dachary technical & organizational (helping other members get funding, managing the infrastructure)

Maybe Libre Solutions will be in a position to commit resources too but I’ll let @realaravinth speak to this.

Given these resources, here is a rough roadmap that would make sense to me. It is quite different from what I had in mind a few months ago, primarily because Forgejo happened and opens new perspectives.

  • The MVP scheduled for February 1st 2023 is moved to March 1st 2023 and includes a renaming of Gitea to Forgejo
  • Both lab.forgefriends.org and lab.enough.community are moved to Gna! by June 2023, primarily for dogfooding GItLab instances
  • Federation is in production between Forgejo & GitLab instances running at Gna! before the end of 2023.

What do you think?

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Hosteadashboard.gna.org 502 Bad Gateway
#2

Greetings!

I can work one day a week and work on shared hosting, and deploy and manage LibrePages and GitPad.

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#3

This is great news :tada:. I know you’re otherwise busy and did not want to presume you’d have time for Gna! this year.

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#4

A few days ago the funding for my work on F3 was accepted. It took an unusually long time because external reviewers had (legitimate) concerns. When I wrote this topic I thought the funding would not be granted and that managing my involvement in Gna! + Forgejo + F3 would not be over committing on my part.

With the F3 grant this changes significantly: there is a workplan to be executed for F3 which means that I now have two obligations: Forgejo release managment and F3. Adding Gna! on top of that seems like a lot and I need to make a choice.

What I must consider if I’m to take a break on Gna! this year is:

  • Would my lack of action on Gna! cause problem to anyone?
  • Would any of the foundations that make Gna! relevant be gone in 2024?
  • Would Gna! be less relevant in 2024 than in 2023?

Since Gna! has not yet been active, I feel that the answer to all of these questions is no and that I will be able to resume my work in January 2024.

Of course this may change at any time if someone decides to work on Gna! but I assume that won’t be the case. Because past behavior is the best predictor of future behavior and that nothing happened in the past three months.

I’ve not made a decision yet: please voice your opinion if you think that me pausing my work on Gna! this year would be a mistake.

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#5

I feel that Gna!'s true potential will only be unleashed once we have federation. Your F3 work is crucial to get there. The forge federation community is very small, and our current efforts are not focussed. So, I recommend we switch to cheaper ways to host our infrastructure (I have a hypervisor that I can share access) or even stop commercial operations.