Winter maintenance of OKFN projects

Open Knowledge Labs
#1

Dear fellow OKFN-ers! I have been receiving security-related warnings from GitHub about various legacy projects, and this morning decided as part of my professional duty to set four of them to Archived mode :slight_smile: I have checked that in each case there was no activity in several years and that the websites were offline. They are:

They are each terrific projects, and the message I would like to send out with this is “badly in need of maintenance! be careful with this code - contact us first if you want to use it!” Please let me know of course if you disagree with any of this.

There are dozens of other projects in similar condition across my various organizations. Do any of you have a good clean up strategy, perhaps including an appropriate virtual graveyard for initiatives we want to remember, but still leave firmly in the past?

Wishing you all a peaceful & safe winter holiday!

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#2

As a lapsed maintainer of publicbodies, I think this is for the best. I’d love to revisit some of these at a later date but we should focus on security for now.

PS: http://publicbodies.org/ is still live

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#3

I agree we should stop services that have standing vulnerabilities but people haven’t had time to work on it for a while.

On the other hand, perhaps, projects that have both a dataset and a front end (e.g., dataportals.org, publicbodies.org) should probably separate those concerns. Datasets don’t have vulnerabilities in the usual sense, even though they can get quite outdated to the point of being of little use. But those are different problems that could be handled in a different way on each case. What do you think?

In the case of Public Bodies, I have been meaning to update the Brazilian data for a while, maybe I can get to do it in holiday time.

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#4

Great perspective, @herrmann! You’re right that the datasets with the dataportals.org and publicbodies.org projects have a lot of uses and should be separated/maintained even if the front-ends are in need of patching.

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