Federated Task Tracking

Introduction

Applications and data are usually tightly coupled: the format, structure, and meaning of data are almost inseparable from the application generating and using them, hindering data portability between disparate applications. Sharing data between applications entails mastering complex and proprietary APIs or export formats, and transforming output data into the necessary structure and meaning for use elsewhere. These are time-consuming and error-prone things to do.

Federation is a way to free up information from the silos of proprietary software, linking different systems together so they are 'connected, but sovereign', and so users can regain control of the data in them, and share them more easily between systems.

This Federated Task-Tracking project builds on the foundation laid in its precursor Federated Timesheets project, which successfully pioneered this approach for time-tracking data such that timesheet data entered into one system are easily made available in others. Its more generalised approach applies to a broader range of real-world scenarios, including live collaborative editing of latency-critical data shared between the systems involved.

Federation aims to provide a technical mechanism to address this misalignment of interests between commercial software vendors and users regarding control of data in their software.

Use Cases

There are many different scenarios making federation useful. The categories below aim to capture these, together with some real-world examples.

Collaborate on the Same Data in Different Instances of the Same Application

Several companies jointly delivering a project that have all standardised on the same application will need to share data between their instances of the application, and all edit the data too. Providers of SaaS-delivered instances may make that available as a feature between different tenants, but this is not widespread. It is even less common for software vendors to make data shareable between on-premises and SaaS deployments.

Federating these instances makes it possible to share data between them in a read-write fashion.

Real-world Example

This project includes an implementation of federation between two different instances of the Tiki issue-tracker.

Collaborate on the Same Data in Different Applications

This is the most likely scenario, with multiple companies jointly delivering a project using their own preferred applications for managing shared project data. Sometimes SaaS providers will make connectors available to their competitors' software, but since this runs contrary to their commercial interests, these are not necessarily effective or well-maintained. Third-party integration tools can be helpful to achieve collaborative data-sharing, although this does entail a cost (usually licensing).

Federation can achieve the same goal, with the approach depending greatly on how much influence or control you have over the systems involved. The practical guide to system federation included with this project describes what to evaluate, and how to approach federation in different contexts.

Real-world Example

The exemplar implementation in this project federates Tiki Tracker with GitHub, using BridgeBot as a proxy for the latter. See the Accessing Federation Demos for details of how this is set up.

Use Case Variants - Asynchronous vs. Real-time Collaboration

Each of the above categories of use case sits on a spectrum of how immediate and synchronous the collaboration needs to be. The most common variant of these cases is asynchronous, in which changes made in one instance of an application are propagated to other instances once complete. However, there is also a real-time variant, in which changes are streamed between instances and visible in them as they happen. This may even require multiple users to edit the same data in different application instances simultaneously.

See System Sovereignty vs. Real-Time Sharing in the Federation Guide for a deeper understanding of this.

Conflict Management

Wherever it is possible to make changes to the same data in multiple places, conflicts are likely to occur. The project examines a variety of approaches to handling conflicts.

How to Federate Applications

See the practical guide to system federation to learn how to do this.

Original Project Plan and Structure

For details of the project's original plan and structure, see the NGI Assure proposal.