BrigadeHub is retiring.

Hello brigade members, supporters and beta testers.

It's been a while, and I apologize for not being as communicative over the past few months. My life has had some major changes recently, which has prompted a lot serious reflection and soul-searching. I've been assessing my own time-availability, and the needs this project has for maintenance and improvement, and I've decided that it's time to make a change. And so, it's with a heavy heart that I am announcing today that I am stepping back from maintaining the BrigadeHub platform. Over the past two years I've received wonderful support from the Code for San Francisco Brigade and various other organizations, but while adoption for the platform was on the rise, the amount of time I've been able to contribute has been slowly shrinking, and without a dedicated volunteer team to contribute and project manage, consistent and stable updates are no longer possible to maintain. While I was previously planning a full architecture rewrite over the next year, I believe it would unfair of me to expect the beta testers I currently have to wait on my limited time-schedule. There is no shame in admitting failure, and I accept that I cannot meet the needs that are currently required by this project and the brigade network.

BrigadeHub is, and will always remain, open source. Previous releases will remain online at the Github organization, and any brigade-sponsored team willing to take over the project needs only contact me (via Twitter or email) and I'll hand over the respective permissions to be able to maintain it. However, short of full adoption by another team, without a maintainer, BrigadeHub will unfortunately be retired itself, and current beta testers are encouraged to move from it onto a more widely-supported CMS solution, such as Laddr, Squarespace, or Wordpress.

I still believe in the overarching vision that BrigadeHub represents: a centralized authoritative source for each brigade to maintain their own information outside of any centralized api: an easy-to-update and easy-to-manage repository of everything a brigade is working on. Part of that vision is still alive, and I hope to continue working on, at least in a limited fashion. The concept of a decentralized and democratized project registry for organizations to share data between themselves more easily was part of the original roadmap of BrigadeHub, and is still something I want to continue movement on. I will post on here in the future when there is notable movement on that, however, as it's still in research phases, it will be a while before anything of note is announced.

Again, I appreciate the support and encouragement I've received as I've worked on this, and while I unfortunately need to set down this torch, I know that in true CfA spirit, another will pick it up, either with this or another project, and help meet the needs of their communities and citizens.

Stay strong and hack on.
Oz Haven (@therebelrobot)