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

Mon May 12 17:47:03 UTC 2014

Hi,

On Mon, May 12, 2014 at 3:27 AM, Nick Stenning <nick.stenning at okfn.org> wrote:
> 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.

I don't have any money to pay for hosting, but I can help with system
administration.

I'm mainly responsible for the 'ivo' site on knowledgeforge that is
still being used.  Can you offer a service redirecting pages to other
servers, to those of use who ask it and can give you apache redirect
snippets to do the work?  That would ease the transition...

Cheers,

Matthew