Decentralisation. I don’t want to fall in the same trap picking a huge platform which can only be ran by a large entity. Federation in Forgejo is taking quite long.

We made a PoC on top of Solid which does work so it is clearly possible, but the code quality is too low to trust the solution.

Our experience so far shows that using Linked Data can give you many apps that work together on parts of the data.

Depend on semantic data models (vocabularies of URIs such as foaf), use triples in your applications, and share these same triples whilst looking at the serialisation (such as xml, jsonld, ttl) as an implementation detail, and you’re a long way towards interoperable apps and information sharing.

If you have many interoperable apps and they can share data, then you’ve went a good distance towards and open market where software can compete. If the data is also openy available to you (as it should) then you took large steps towards sovereignty too. You’ll have a choice of applications to use and you can easily move the data between the applications.

Feel free to ask questions should you have any.

Interesting read. I’ve glanced over sections and read others.

I’ve been involved in the use of some of these frameworks. They are good reference frameworks but they are most often overly heavy to get started and/or the implementation is most often not supporting what the marketing material suggests.

Good integration projects start from limited partners with limited datasets exchanging with each other knowing they want to exchange with more partners in the future. Limited can be two to seven and they can even be in the same organisation. Perhaps it works with more, I have not been involved in that. They contain only the necessary roles and know how they’ll expand. These frameworks are great to get the expansion options in place. However, to get something going we’ve seen that a cheap and structurally correct solution to data sharing gets the ball running more quickly and for longer, then an expensive and heavy project which needs all sorts of approvals (even if it would be superior).

Projects that start with the weight of all the roles filled in by different actors need substantial funding to get started and I don’t think they generally last after funding dried up. Projects faking their way through the extra roles and providing the most limited interpretation of some of these roles with the project having some (even vague) shared benefit seem to survive past the grant stage.

Get some basics right and get going is my advice. Identifiers, shared and extensible data models, and a clear way of sharing data.

I like these frameworks, they help set the stage, but my gosh do they see problems where there are none when a project is just getting started.

Framework makes it their point but also charges for it. Some big make laptops also allow to upgrade parts.

But lets not forget Linux specific laptops. They generally allow upgrading ram and storage. Slimbook even sold me a newer (but also new) keyboard when mine gave up after 5 years or so. Most parts seem to be available still.

Some brands to look for in this group are Tuxedo, bto, slimbook, starbook. Clevo might work too.