[knowledgeforge-user] IMPORTANT: KnowledgeForge seeking hosting + volunteers, or shutting down

Mon May 12 10:27:47 UTC 2014

Dear users of KnowledgeForge,

As you'll know, the Open Knowledge Foundation (now Open Knowledge) has
run KnowledgeForge (http://knowledgeforge.net), a place for hosting free
and open code, content and research projects, for some years now. Since
2005, KnowledgeForge and the attendant services have been hosted on our
hardware, or on hardware generously donated to us, and the machine
running the site has been kept up-to-date and secure by our systems
administrators.

However, the time has come for us to hand over the responsibility for
running KnowledgeForge. The underlying software, KForge, still works,
but is ageing, and we don't currently take an active part in maintaining
it. None of our own projects use KnowledgeForge on a day-to-day basis,
and while we have for a long time run the site for the community using
it, the time has come to focus our efforts on other things.

As such, this email serves two purposes:

1) As an open offer to any member of this community who would be able to
provide hosting and administrative oversight for the KnowledgeForge
service. We currently host the service on an Amazon AWS m1.small
instance (which corresponds to a 2-core, 2GiB RAM virtual server, with
about 50GB of storage, excluding backups). The costs associated with the
hosting are relatively modest, coming to between $20 and $40 per month
at AWS, and could probably be cheaper elsewhere. Please contact me
directly if you are interested in taking over management of
KnowledgeForge.

2) As a notice that in the absence of any offers of help, we will be
shutting down the KnowledgeForge service permanently on or shortly after
1 August 2014, that is in just over three months time from now. If we
are unable to find a new home for KnowledgeForge, we will of course help
any users of the service to extract all their data in advance of the
switchoff.

It's been a fun ride, and I'm sorry for disappointing those of you who
are still using KnowledgeForge. I hope we can find a new home for the
site: do please feel free to circulate this email to anyone who you
think might be able to help.

-N

-- 
Nick Stenning
Technical Director, Open Knowledge Foundation