Discuss future plans for Trovebox

[jmathai]

Things have been quiet around here for a while. It's due to multiple reasons including the core team focusing on the business side of things and then ultimately the shutdown of Trovebox.com.

Quite a few folks have asked what will come of the Trovebox community and open source software. This is where we have that conversation. What you see here is the result of several years of full time commitment by a small team of folks plus contributions from the community.

Trovebox exists as an organization on Github and we have 25 members with various levels of access to the repositories. We should revisit the different teams and see who wants to remain an active participant and add any who are not yet involved.

The plan for features and direction was in the past directed (almost entirely) by the core team. I'd like to keep the focus narrow and spend time on polishing current and new features instead of allowing lots of sub par features to creep in. That's been one of the successes of Trovebox thus far.

That being said, let's discuss.

[rufuspollock]

Hi, I'm Rufus Pollock from Open Knowledge.

I'm delighted to see this issue as I was wondering what are your plans for stewarding the code and (as a distinct thing) the service going forward? (By service I mean a (central) hosted instance of the code that is usable - i.e. a continuation of https://trovebox.com and its relevant APIs).

I ask this both as an avid user (I am uploading photos from my phone yesterday) and as President of Open Knowledge where one of the major things we think we could (and should) be doing is stewarding important open data / open content / open service projects (in a way similar but different to the way Apache acts for certain open-source software projects).

Trovebox, whether in terms of code, or even in terms of service, seems to be something that is eminently worthy of this stewardship. You may already have plans here but if you did not I wonder if it would be worth a quick chat to see if there were any possibilities where Open Knowledge (and more importantly its community) may be able to contribute in some way.

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A end of service question: whilst raw photos have already been archived to our chosen storage what about the metadata (tags, creation dat etc). I believe that #1322 never got implemented (#1322 = Store metadata with photo in backend storage (as well as in DB))

[jmathai]

any possibilities where Open Knowledge (and more importantly its community) may be able to contribute in some way.

@rgrp can you expand on this? Has OKFN worked with other communities or projects to help in a similar transition?

You're right about #1322 never being implemented. This is something we've had internal discussions about for a long time. I would like to incorporate this into the archiving but it seems to make more sense to be added to the core code (and by extension, the archiving). There was never a pull request for it or any code that does this work so I'm open to ideas.

[michielbdejong]

About the service part going forward, I'm offering continued Trovebox hosting for 8 euros a month. So far, two people have signed up (although I have yet to import their data, hopefully that will succeed in the four weeks left before the 15 March shutdown).

I would also be interested in continuing hosting for all customers (how many are there, actually?), simply to stop this content from disappearing from the web. Maybe OKFN (and/or the Internet Archive) can help with finding the necessary money for that (if I offer the sysadmin work as a volunteer, then what would ballpark monthly hosting costs be?).

It would be great to send out an announcement one day before shutdown-day that trovebox.com URLs will stay up, thanks to a coordinated effort of the community. In particular, it would be a token victory for the open web, and could be repeated at the next site death, provided the code is either already open source, or open sourced at shutdown.

[michielbdejong]

@jmathai this is starting to get very urgent!

On https://trovebox.com/ it (still) says you’ll be shutting down the hosted Trovebox service on March 15, meaning we only have little more 3 weeks left to organize all of this, right?

[michielbdejong]

Got a reaction from @jmathai via Twitter two weeks ago, but no movement on any of this since then.

Let's hope they don't shut down any of the accounts without resolving this. For now, it looks like I'm going to have to issue refunds to the people I'm trying to help to move off trovebox.com. :(

[jmathai]

There hasn't been much feedback in terms of ideas of volunteer efforts to continue Trovebox. After much thought and discussion I believe it's best that I'm not personally involved after any possible transition. It seems that will help Trovebox evolve on its own; and that makes sense to me.

@rgrp Could you elaborate on what OKFN could do to help?

@rgrp: what about the metadata (tags, creation dat etc). I believe that #1322 never got implemented (#1322 = Store metadata with photo in backend storage (as well as in DB))

In lieu of implementing #1322 we did make sure that the exports store tags, titles, descriptions into EXIF/IPTC. This was confirmed in the last email we sent out.

@michielbdejong: no movement on any of this since then

@michielbdejong We've sent out an email last week. Admittedly, the progress has been slower but our goal is to make sure users get their data out. I'd prefer to keep this thread focused on figuring out what happens with the Trovebox source code. I did updated website though.

Trovebox.com site will be shutting down March 31, 2015. We may extend this deadline to help accomodate customers to obtain archives of their photos.

[russmac]

Hey, You may not have noticed but your project appears to be non functional
You have several tickets here indicating that regardless of configuration your setup does not work.

Could you update your readme.md to indicate its broken or provide a base sql for people to set things up themselves. Otherwise many more people may sink time into this without knowing its broken.

[russmac]

See #1572 I have engineered a work around for you.

[hfiguiere]

I opened #1584 as a way to initiate a "new governance" for the project. By governance it is about put the open source project back on its feet so that it can: 1. deliver software 2. accept contributions.

For 2, we need a clear contributor policy, including, I highly recommend, a process of signing off on pull request (reviews)

[jmathai]

Agree with @hfiguiere. After discussing transitioning Trovebox with others I believe it's better if I'm not actively involved once the "new governance" is set up. However I'm happy to participate in that transition.

We need folks to voluntarily step up to take the reigns though :).

[rufuspollock]

@jmathai couple of thoughts:

• Could you do a call out for maintainers through existing twitter etc pointing to e.g. this ticket
• Would you also be transferring things like twitter and any other relevant assets to group of maintainers

For my part, I note that you may want some institutional legal home - if only to do things like be clear on who can act as legal custodian for assets including accounts and code etc. As I've mentioned above Open Knowledge have been involved in this way and as general contributors in various projects such as http://ckan.org/.

[jmathai]

@rgrp Done and yes. Happy to transfer all accounts and assets. Would prefer an institutional home as you suggested and would love for it to be OKFN :).

https://twitter.com/trovebox/status/621724451453841408

[emanchado]

@jmathai will you guys be able to answer questions about the code? I think that could be extremely helpful. Maybe create some kind of mailing list or forum?

I certainly won't have time to be a maintainer, and I'm not even sure I have enough interest, but I might be able to help with a ticket or two, esp. if I feel I don't have to figure everything out myself :-)

[jmathai]

@emanchado There's a mailing list but most discussions have happened here on Github or Twitter. The mailing list is there though and people are subscribed. Unsure how effective it is.

However questions need to be answered we can make sure questions are answered and documented.