Tag: forges

Forges meeting report (COCLICO + fusionforge + codendi + others)

I’ve just returned from a 2 days public meeting (plus 1 COCLICO internal meeting) held in Issy-Les-Moulineaux at Orange R&D about forges.

The meeting was organised by the COCLICO partners and welcomed the first FusionForge meeting, as well as other interested forges developers and users from Codendi, novaforge, nforge, sourcesup, etc.

The generic content was a mix of informal discussions, and technical presentations (and debates) in order to try and improve collaboration and interoperability among these forges. A proposal that has emerged from the discussions is to try and use more than today the PlanetForge RSS agregator and wiki (and lists), as an open community gathering people from various forges, in order to improve shared knowledge, inform of ongoing developments and more generally favour collaboration of tools.

On FusionForge side, there were many more precise discussions on topics like roadmap, organization, release, quality process, governance, marketing, contributions, packaging, etc.

There will probably be more detailed reports, but I should express my thanks to all those who came (sometimes from abroad, like Korea and Germany) to make this a very fruitful meeting.

We intend to held such meetings every now and then, and maybe at the beginning of the summer, still under the umbrella of the COCLICO project, but probably organized more around PlanetForge.org.

I hope this will have a positive impact on the dynamics and collaboration between projects, and on the global forges ecosystem in the future. See you next time.

COCLICO started : many interesting development in forges ahead of us in the 2 coming years

We have started the COCLICO project this friday, with a meeting grouping many actors coming from various french regions, that operate in the area of open source forges (around FusionForge, NovaForge, Codendi, Trac, PicoForge, etc.). It’s a “Pôle de Compétitivité” (french R&D clusters) project which is funded by french public agencies, under the frame of both the FLOSS thematic group of System@tic (Paris) and Minalogic (Grenoble).

COCLICO will last 2 years and will let us all collaborate on producing FLOSS components that should allow much more interoperability between the open source forges, and probably deliver interesting standards that should allow to integrate forges with more tools in order to support new uses. We have no website yet, but it will be setup next week.

Of course a collaboration project with many companies (with various profiles, from the single consultant to the very large corporations) and academics is always requiring some effort so that everyone collaborates, but we have a strong focus on producing code as first steps, and I’m quite confident we all believe that FLOSS is necessary to share the innovation efforts.

I hope it will be a great occasion to bring interesting new things in the FLOSS ecosystem, and that we’ll manage to let others participate even if they are not funded by COCLICO, since one of the goals of the project is to bring momentum in the general forges ecosystem.

As far as we’re concerned at Institut TELECOM, we’re leading two workpackages on interoperability and community/ecosystem.

I’m very excited about this project, which together with our running Helios project should allow us to contribute in a significant way to FLOSS development tools and to the general quality of the FLOSS development process.

Expect more spamming from me about forges in the future on this blog 😉

Update : we now have a website both with more details in french (including a description of the project’s work-packages) and in english (still empty at the moment, working on it).

COCLICO start : we’ll finally held the kickoff soon

The COCLICO (yes, we’ll have a website soon, I hope) R&D project in the french cluster on FLOSS has been setup quite a long time ago, and we’ve awaited anxiously the time we could start working on it.

Several hazards happened in the way when some initial partners withdrew from the final consortium. Hopefully, we managed to make it anyway, by replacing them on some key tasks, and we’ll probably be able to run the project anyway.

So we’ll finally have the kickoff meeting on early october, and will finally start working on fostering the libre forges ecosystem.

I hope this will provide useful contributions to the community and to FLOSS in general, alhough we’ll have to overcome the difficulties in such collaboration projects before we can deliver real concrete things (like establishing common work practices, agreeing on tasks to be done, building trust, maximizing meetings efficiency, having a good signal/noise ratio, and generally produce good FLOSS quality even though not everybody have the same constraints). I hope we’ll be able to stick to a release early + release often habit anyway.

Looking forward to tell you more about it once we’ve started.