From 946e5ed79a8a4c40cef565ebfd0fe5debba2179c Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001
From: Kurt Garloff <kurt@garloff.de>
Date: Fri, 13 Dec 2024 08:50:59 +0100
Subject: [PATCH] Write intro.

Personal words, looking back and looking into the future.

Signed-off-by: Kurt Garloff <kurt@garloff.de>
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 intro: |-
-  <p>,</p>
-  <p></p>
-  <p> Best wishes,</p>
-  <p></p>
+  <p>Dear community,</p>
+  <p>During the last weeks, I have spent a lot of my time looking back, making sure we have
+  recorded all the outcomes of our joint work, so none of great contributions get lost.
+  We have to write a report, and this consumed quite some attention. So if you experienced the
+  SCS project team not being as responsive as it should have been, you now know why.<br/>
+  The benefit of looking back is that I can see how much we have achieved together, and, yes,
+  it makes me proud. We started out with the mourning how much we are losing control
+  over IT platforms by outsourcing it to opaque platform providers from increasingly far away.
+  Open Source had allowed us to regain control over our local IT with an OSS operating system
+  ecosystem and to foster the rise of the modern internet-based technology explosion thanks to
+  *permissionless innovation*. We needed to translate this now into a world of cloud
+  platforms and SCS was our attempt to contribute to this.<br/>
+  We were lucky to gain funding from the German government, to find an engaged and skilled
+  community, to hire smart and engaged people into our team and to be able to build on top of
+  amazing upstream communities. We refined our thinking on the vision and created these three
+  pillars *Certifiable Standards*, *Modular OSS implementation* and *Open Operations*
+  with the associated *SCS-compatible*, *SCS-open* and *SCS-sovereign* labels that certify
+  these. We built a lot of software, tests, documentation, standards. And not just for
+  the sake of it, but for operators that are using the results, every day, in their
+  production setups, such are the Bayern Cloud Schule (ByCS) that serves hundreds of
+  thousands students every day built on top of PlusCloudOpen, using SCS technology.
+  We created quite some awareness for what we do by writing articles, visiting conferences
+  and even creating our own SCS summits. Digital Sovereignty is a major topic these days,
+  for better or worse.</br>
+  With the end of the year, the funding period is over; the work will go on in a new
+  shape. Not everything is fully worked out yet, but with the Forum SCS-Standards in
+  the OSBA (see below) we have one major pillar (the *Certifiable Standards*) that's
+  in very good shape already. And the interest in our approach, our standards, our
+  technology is higher than ever, where we have increasing interest from neighbour
+  countries and even the international level with the govstack project (see below) and
+  joint work with the UNICC.<br/>
+  It's been a privilege to be in a driver position for this great project -- definitely
+  the most rewarding one I have been involved with in my life. I will stay involved,
+  supporting the forum where I can and building my own little business S7n Cloud
+  Services GmbH, which will support the technology partners and operators with
+  engineering, integration and consulting services. The end of the funded project is
+  the start of the next stage and I'm looking forward to continuing to work with
+  hopefully many of you and hopefully also quite some new community members and partners!
+  </p>
+  <p>Enjoy reading the digest, have a great christmas break and see you next year,</p>
+  <p>Kurt</p>
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   image: /assets/images/39/.png