OFN Iberia - Katuma

International Governance
1

Hello everyone,

I’d like to bring up a topic to hear the opinions of the entire community and perhaps spark some ideas that could be put into practice. For some time now, Katuma has been experiencing difficulties in promoting, managing, and supporting OFN within the Iberian Peninsula. The instance is being updated by the global community (correct me if I’m wrong). For several years, the creation and promotion of an OFN Iberia group have been proposed to fill this gap. Currently, we have a team that has decided to take the initiative and establish itself as an association that can begin to take on these responsibilities. For the past few months, we’ve been trying to work on the shift in responsibilities and have been facing challenges in maintaining open and fruitful communication with Katuma. Do you have any suggestions on how we could approach this governance change?

From conversations with Katuma late last year, the intention is to maintain the current instance to avoid duplicating efforts. However, this raises several questions that need to be addressed:

  • If we start promoting OFN from other sources outside of Katuma, we don’t have the guarantee of server updates or even its availability (I’m unsure who is currently covering the cost or where it’s hosted).
  • Due to the uncertainty of the hosting situation, introducing changes or enabling other options is not, in the current situation, a viable choice.
  • There’s a discrepancy regarding the capacity to refer to this instance as a resource of OFN Iberia, which causes other credibility issues.
  • …

We are currently working in different regions and carrying out projects that require answers to the mentioned questions.

I believe the global community hasn’t faced this situation in the past, and I’d like to know your opinion on the matter.

1 Like
2

Thanks for raising this issue @mikel

From my earlier conversations with Katuma, my understanding (now a bit out of date) is that;

  1. Katuma have always been committed to working with OFN and very values-aligned with OFN
  2. In recent years the uptake of the OFN platform in Catalonia has been low. This has resulted in Katuma needing to focus attention elsewhere
  3. Despite this @Eugeni has very kindly agreed to carry on hosting the instance and Katuma still pays the hosting fees. But there is no time resource available in Katuma to do any other work in building the OFN instance.

So my suggestion would be that we explore with Eugeni and the rest of the Katuma team the possibility of the other people interested in OFN Iberia to take over the hosting of the server.