This Day of Reconciliation we’re pleased to announce that key parts of SAFIRE federation hub (including the transfer notices) are now available in Sesotho. This brings the number of South African official languages supported by the federation to five.
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The SAFIRE federation hub (including the transfer notices) is now available in both IsiZulu and isiXhosa in addition to the existing Afrikaans and English. This covers the four most widely spoken home languages according to Stats SA.
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SAFIRE’s website was originally created using Wordpress, something that was inherited when custodianship of the federation passed to TENET. For various reasons we have decided to abandon Wordpress in favour of a modern static site generator, and have chosen to adopt Hugo.
One substantial benefit of this approach is increased transparency, particularly around changes to policies. The Hugo source is stored in a public GitHub repository, thus allowing Participants to peruse the commit history of any document.
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SAFIRE is in the process of transitioning, both in architecture (from full-mesh to hub-and-spoke) and governance (from the SCA to TENET). The purpose of this post is to provide more detail on the transitional arrangements.
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A new version of the SAFIRE logo has been produced, and is in the process of being trademarked. Various proposals were circulated amongst a fairly diverse group of people, and they were asked to vote. The final version is the one that both had the broadest appeal and was most accessible.
Any use of the old “Federating Research & Education Systems” logo will need to be updated/replaced. New versions will be available in the logos & branding section once we’re reasonably sure the IP concerns have been sufficiently addressed.
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We’ve been talking about a new web site for some time, and had hoped to relaunch a new, complete site with a fresh look and feel once we’d managed to get the design work completed. What you’re seeing isn’t that site; it’s an interim update, with some new content.
Unfortunately the whole exercise was immeasurably complicated by needing to redevelop the SAFIRE logo branding to address some intellectual property concerns. That process has taken many months to sort out, and has stalled all sorts of things that depend on a brand and logo. The good news is that we seem to be nearing the end of it, even though it has not yet been completed (meaning we can’t show it to you).
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