Hosted identi.ca

[Paul W. Frields]

Evan, the principal and CEO behind laconi.ca and identi.ca (Control
Yourself, Inc. in Montreal), has started offering free hosted
instances to some free projects.  I met Evan at Open Source Bridge in
Portland last month and he asked me if the Fedora Project would be
interested in one.  I told him we would definitely love to try it out,
because of our mission of and support for 100% free and open software
and services.  I believe this is their status.net service, launched
very recently.

Now that Evan says there are some of these in existence now, I can let
that cat out of the bag and start a discussion here.  This would
probably involve people in Infrastructure, Design, and potentially
Websites and Marketing.  The goals are to:

(1) Find someone interested from each involved team to work with the
    folks at CY on getting a hosted instance established.  Timeline is
    flexible, but I think establishing the instance probably comes
    before applying any design so we can try it out privately before
    launching it as a *.fedoraproject.org service.

(2) Assuming things look good, provide a status.fedoraproject.org for
    our users that includes Fedora branding.

There are some other issues involved like sponsorship that I can take
care of either personally or with the Board, but which don't really
matter in the context of this list.  Details I know about the service:

* The accounts would be separate from those on the normal identi.ca
  service, but people on identi.ca could subscribe to feeds from the
  hosted instance, and vice versa

* The service would act as an OpenID consumer, and since FAS is an
  OpenID provider, that could be sufficient to establish an account

I don't know yet how the public timelines can be combined.  Obviously
we don't want to *fragment* public status information, but on the
other hand, I really like the idea of having a true Fedora Project
public timeline that's always full of relevant information.  Now that
we have tools like gwibber and other software and services that allow
you to set all status at once, the risk of sequestering our
information away from the larger public are very low.  We can even
write an instruction guide that would help people stay connected while
using this service.

So, who's interested in working on this?

-- 
Paul W. Frields                                http://paul.frields.org/
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