Large-Scale RDM Without a Centralization Cost

Software development and data curation or analysis share many of their issues: keeping track of the evolution of files – ideally with information on how, why, when, and by whom – , organizing collaboration with multiple people, keeping track of known issues and other TODOs, discussing changes, making versions available to others, automating tasks, and more. Often you will even have to write code as part of a data project, blurring the line between the two even more. In the free and open-source software development world these issues already have well established solutions: a version control system keeps track of your projects history and ongoing development, a forge can serve as a collaboration hub, CI/CD services provide flexible automation. So, why not apply them to our data management needs? Git, git-annex and DataLad together build the foundation of a decentralized version control system for large datasets, with DataLad being specifically tailored towards Research Data Management. Forgejo-aneksajo on the other hand extends Forgejo – a well-established free software git forge – with git-annex support, turning it into a versatile self-hostable (meta-)data collaboration hub for this ecosystem.