Following the presentation at the end of March in the RSE Working Group and the well-attended online session of the Common Infrastructure Section in mid-April, DataPLANT is now in the process of writing a proposal for Base4NFDI with the input to promote a potential joint service. We have been using GitLab in the consortium for some time for our DataHUB, but we also use public (commercial) resources for software development. Sustainability is always a bit of a question here, as is whether companies will change or discontinue such services at some point. The NFDI is so large that it requires its own activities, which are best combined with other ongoing initiatives.

At the core is certainly code management and the development, operation and management of open source communities around the individual software packages. There is a great demand here, which became clear at the Task Force Governance meeting once again. At the moment, it is certainly the software framework GitLab that comes closest to those points. But to a certain extent it is also about the general idea, as software will no longer disappear from the field of science.

We are developing the proposal based on the Base4NFDI guidelines. The resulting proposal has already been made available to many partners and players for additions and comments. In preparation, we presented a poster at the CoRDI to start the discussion. We had also already published the general concepts in papers and presented them at the E-Science Days. At the moment we are still talking to various other consortia as well as providers who are involved with GitLab and operate their own resources.