[okfn-discuss] KForge Club: Call for Participation

[John Bywater]

KFORGE CLUB: CALL FOR PARTICIPATION

An invitation to join KForge Club.

JOIN HERE
You can join KForge Club here:
http://appropriatesoftware.net/kforgeclub/JoinHere.html

Joining KForge Club is free of charge. KForge Club members are simply
involved in a safe, transparent, and regular process of sharing common
costs. Joining implies no commitment whatsoever (you can say 'No' later).

Members are invited to submit new proposals, and to comment on proposals
submitted by others. A prospectus of such proposals is published, and
shares of the costs are discussed with those showing interest. A call
for agreement is made. Proposals that achieve consensus are actioned,
and reported upon at regular intervals.

BACKGROUND
KForge is a stable, open-source, enterprise application for project
hosting. KForge provisions project services on-demand, and controls
access with a robust, role-based, single sign-on access controller.
Project services include:

* Version control systems (e.g. Git, Mercurial, Subversion)
* Project framework with mechanisms to plan and track work (e.g. Trac)
* Wikis and mailing lists (e.g. MoinMoin, Mailman)
* Content management systems and blogs (e.g. Joomla, Wordpress)

KForge also provides a complete web interface for administration of
project members and services, as well as a fully-developed plugin system
so that new kinds of services can be added easily.

KFORGE CLUB
It is clear that there are common project hosting needs across most
organisations. For the last 4 years, the goals and the resources for
KForge development have been provided solely by the Open Knowledge
Foundation and the Appropriate Software Foundation.

KForge Club is a way to share the cost of developing project hosting
capabilities, so that every project can benefit from well-supported,
high-quality, open-source, project hosting architecture.

In order to sustain the development of KForge, we are seeking to share
the objectives and costs of KForge development with others. We would
like to emphasize that KForge will, of course, remain open-source software.

You can find out more about KForge Club here:
http://appropriatesoftware.net/kforgeclub/ServiceDesk.html

SCHEDULE
02 November 2009  -  Call for Participation
16 November 2009  -  Call for Proposals
14 December 2009  -  Publish Prospectus
11 January 2010   -  Call for Agreement
29 January 2010   -  End of cycle

ABOUT US
KForge Club is hosted by John Bywater (Appropriate Software Foundation)
and Rufus Pollock (Open Knowledge Foundation).

The Appropriate Software Foundation is a service-oriented software and
organisation development consultancy, dedicated to creating and
providing open-source software services that enable small organisations
to accomplish their objects.

The Open Knowledge Foundation is a not-for-profit organization founded
in 2004 and dedicated to promoting open knowledge in all its forms.  It
is a leader in this field nationally and internationally.