This year will see another edition of the OSS 2010 conference, as well as its Workshop on Public Data about Software Development (WOPDASD).
Here’s a quick link to the call for papers.
9/03/2010
19/02/2010
Vidéos de certaines confs du thème Développement des RMLL 2009
Free Electrons vient de mettre en ligne des vidéos des conférences qu’ils ont filmées aux RMLL 2009.
Une partie des vidéos porte sur le thème “Développement” que j’ai coordonné.
Voici la liste des interventions filmées :
- Migration à Git du projet GNOME, par Frédéric Peters (GNOME)
- Méthodes de vote : comment consulter les développeurs d’un projet sans fausser le résultat avant de poser la question, par Lucas Nussbaum (Debian)
- Développement Open Source : un retour des tranchées, le projet Jajuk, par Bertrand Florat (Jajuk)
- Comment les outils et l’esprit Open Source permettent de faire de meilleurs projets, par Erlé Le Gac, Bertrand Florat (Capgemini)
Le son n’est pas toujours top, mais c’est fait avec les moyens du bord, bénévolement 
Vous trouverez les pointeurs vers les vidéos et les slides chez Free Electrons (en bas de liste).
Et n’oubliez pas : l’édition 2010 remet ça, avec un appel à contributions toujours ouvert.
8/02/2010
New inter-forges discussion list on planetforge.org
You work on developing a software forge, you’re an admin for a software forge, or a project administrator.
Join us and discuss (in english) forge matters on discussions@planetforge.org, to try and improve communication, sharing, reuse and interoperability among various hosting platforms, and collaborative development tools.
You may prefer joining the PlanetForge RSS aggregator if you blog about forges (feel free to add it to your preferred RSS reader).
Working on standard forge exchange format
As part of COCLICO, we’re working on an exchange format for forges, that should help dump, restore, export and import from different software forges.
There are various use cases for this, like moving a project from one forge to another, but also as backup/restore feature for forge admins. More about the rationale here.
We’d like this format to be a standard some day, so it should have good properties so that it’s generic enough and at the same time easy to adopt. Thus it would be relatively easy to contribute new exporters or importers to an framework (for which we’ll implement basic core tools), while having a long-lasting format that can still be used in the future.
A lot of work ahead of us, and this is just a short notice in case you’re interested and you’d like to know more
Stay tuned, and if interested, join discussions@planetforge.org to discuss this topic.
P.S.: yes, it’s a rebirth of CoopX, somehow (see the coopx tag in my blog for more details)
4/02/2010
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.
26/01/2010
New SF.net project for HELIOS
The Helios project is gradually going more open, as we start releasing and committing in the open into a SF.net project (heliosplatform).
Among the tools offered by SF.net we will use a blog (wordpress), the wiki (mediawiki) and the SVN, for a start.
The project’s SVN repo will be populated with all components we have developed, as we progressively switch our SVN hosting. The first piece we have committed is the Mantis OSLC REST server module.
17/01/2010
Meeting FusionForge à l’invitation de COCLICO, à Paris le 3 février
Le projet COCLICO invite les développeurs et utilisateurs de FusionForge à se retrouver à Issy les Moulineaux (France) le 3 février 2010 pour une journée destinée au travail technique sur ce logiciel.
Pour plus de détails veuillez vous référer à l’annonce en anglais : FusionForge developers/users meeting coming up, notamment pour les détails sur le contact des organisateurs.
Some news of our efforts around OSLC-CM and future plans
OSLC-CM V1 is a proposed standard for REST APIs of bugtrackers, and in our seek for more interoperability in the bugtracker space, we’ve been very interested in it.
OSLC-CM is quite young and only so far implemented in proprietary tools (although elaborated in an open way) on the server side, and as we believe in FLOSS, we’ve started trying to implement basics of server side plugins for a few bugtrackers.
In addition to a demo server that’s simulating the behaviour of a bugtracker, we have started implementing a Mantis plugin and FusionForge and Codendi trackers add-ons (all PHP and based on Zend framework, see this project on picoforge). All are very basic, but we hope they will be the basis for future OSLC-CM compatible servers in these tools.
At the same time we’ve been experimenting with the code already published in Mylyn to support OSLC-CM on the client side. Not everything is public yet in Mylyn, as the elements that have been developped for some connectors of Tasktop to the proprietary tools are being ported to the open source code of Mylyn.
We have thus been able to use the Junit tests classes of Mylyn and tweak them in a way to connect to an instance of the demo server for Mantis (including handling some Basic auth), and be able to retrieve the first bugs descriptions 
Now that this works, we’ll try and add some Java code (maybe reusing Mylyn client libs) to doc4 (being developped as part of Helios) in order to start linking doc4 and Mantis so that this can be used in the Helios platform. This may involve mixing code of XWiki and Mylyn… hmmm… well, we’ll see.
Next steps may be also to try and implement a connector in Python that might be used in tools like bts-link.
Then whichever Python or Java client libraries we have, will allow us to use them inside FetchBugs4.me to connect and harvest bugs of OSLC-CM compliant bugtrackers eventually.
Lots of interesting developments ahead. Stay tuned.
11/12/2009
New paper on observation of contributions in forges through standard feeds
Just a quick word to mention the paper published at SITIS 2009 by our collegue Vu.
Biblio entry : DANG Quang Vu, BAC Christian, BERGER Olivier, VLASCEANU Valentin, Supporting situation awareness in FLOSS projects by semantical aggregation of tools feeds. The 5th International Conference on Signal Image Technology and Internet Based Systems (SITIS’09), 29 november – 04 december 2009, Marrakech, Morocco, 2009
At all good libraries soon
Here’s the abstract :
It is rather difficult to monitor or visualize what can be the contribution of a member in a collaboration project, especially when the project uses multiple tools to produce its results. This is the case for collaborative development of FLOSS software, that uses Wiki, bug tracker, mailing lists and source code management tools. This paper presents an approach to data collection by using aggregation of feeds published by the different tools of a software forge. To allow this aggregation, collected data is semantically reformatted into Semantic Web standards: RDF, DC, DOAP, FOAF and EvoOnt. Resulting data can then be processed, re-published or displayed to project members. We implemented this approach in a supervision module that has been integrated into the PicoForge platform. This module is able to draw a live graph of the social community out of the different sources of data, and in turn exports semantic feeds for other uses.
7/12/2009
RIP twiki in Debian
The twiki package has been removed from Debian.
The package was not really maintained, and twiki’s maintenance still required some attention, as there were quite a lot security issues. So the removal is logical.
I had tried and help maintain it in good shape, but couldn’t do much recently, as we’ve moved a little bit away from its inegration in PicoForge, having other matters to care for in Helios and Coclico these days.
Maybe foswiki (the more open fork of twiki) will enter Debian some day. The ITP is there, and there are unofficial packages to be tested, for those that would need to transition from the previous installations of twiki on Debian. More details in the fowsiki ITP.
Anyway, thanks for all the good work to all those who spent time working on TWiki’s packages in Debian.
As for me, maybe some day, I’ll be interested in contributing some time to Foswiki, should we deploy it alongside FusionForge some day.
2/12/2009
First release (0.1) of a far from complete OSLC-CM V1 demo server
We’re working on implementing a demo/test server for the OSLC-CM V1 protocol, in order to help test client tools.
We’ve released (under a BSD license) a first 0.1 preliminary version that only supports GET queries, that’ll lead the way to an expected complete demo server of OSLC-CM V1 when the 1.0 version will be finished.
At the moment, it will only provide a minimal REST implementation of a PHP server using zend, and will produce JSON or XML/RDF views of fictionnal bugs contructed out of contents of a CSV file.
More details may be found at : https://picoforge.int-evry.fr/cgi-bin/twiki/view/Oslc/Web/, whereas the code is in the Download page there.
3/10/2009
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).
First webcast of a demonstrator of our bug ontology’s use
We have setup, as part of our work in Helios, a very early demonstrator of a database of RDF facts about bugs in several distributions (currently Debian and Mandriva), in order to try and validate the Ontology describing bugs that we develop.
Here’s a pointer to the first webcast on fetchbugs4.me’s blog, with more details.
1/10/2009
Very interesting presentations this morning at OWF about the future of the Semantic Desktop
I’ve attended this morning the OWF session on the future Semantic Desktops, with excellent presentations by Stefan Decker (DERI) on the concepts of the Semantic Web and the Social Semantic Desktop, by the Zeitgeist project guys (Seif Lofty and Alexander Gabriel), and finally by Sebastian Trüg demonstrating the Nepomuk semantic desktop components in KDE.
It was a good occasion to meet these people (together with Henry Story) and talk a little bit about our efforts in the area of bugtracking and Semantic Web, and to discuss the future of the Baetle ontology, and do more teasing for fetchbugs4.me.
I hope some day, we integrate the models and tools so that bugs filed on bugtrackers can be referenced and manipulated with Desktop tools through interoperable APIs and common ontologies. More work ahead of us in Helios
29/09/2009
I’ll be speaking about bugs, Helios, fetchbugs4.me at OSDC.fr
I’ll be giving a speech on Saturday about our efforts in Helios to foster interoperability between bugtrackers and bugs modeling on the Semantic Web : Bugtracking sur le web sémantique. See you in La cité des Sciences in Paris Saturday at 14:00 (free entrance).
