2025-06-18 –, January Breakout Room
With the rise of open-source and self-hosted forges such as Forgejo, Gitlab, or Sourcehut, the need for decentralized cooperation emerges as a real challenge. Ongoing experiments around ActivityPub and protocols linked to the Fediverse are today paving the way for a more robust and resilient ecosystem of collaborative platforms. We will, in particular, explore this topic in the context of research and development in science, education, and design.
Originally created for developing the Linux kernel, Git has over time become the cornerstone of global digital development practices. Its popularity has truly exploded with the invention of GitHub, which has coupled Git with a web interface, thus spreading the use of collaborative development platforms today known as 'forges'. Today, the main use case of a forge is software development, but new types of forges are slowly emerging, such as educational forges or design forges.
Considering the diversity of backgrounds and expectations of these new kind of users (teachers, researchers, designers, …), there's a real need for a more open and decentralized ecosystem of forges. In this presentation, we will particularly focus on challenges regarding forge federation and the constraints and expectations of forge users in the context of the “open science” movement, the rise of hybrid environments involving research-based design, and more broadly, 'citizen development'.
Milovann Yanatchov is an architect, a free software developer, and an associate professor in computational design.