Clearly defined abstraction layer for analytics

[xchangeee]

Topic

Question about project policies

Question

This project looks really awesome, I'm looking forward to use it. 🙏

My understanding so far is that this project is developed with public european funds so we can have cool awesome self-hostable open source software that is a bit more independent from US-based companies and politics.

While checking out your helm chart I noticed there is an ingress/service configuration for posthog, which is a Y-Combinator backed startup.

Looking at your code, it seems you are using PostHog for product analytics.

The ingress is disabled by default and you need a posthog key to actually send data, so it should not affect users and it seems the feature is actually targeted to developers.

I am still wondering, why does this even exist in the (production-deployment?) helm chart and do you plan to keep it in there?

As a side question, do you want to keep source code and collaboration infra on GitHub or are there plans to move this to a EU-based provider?

[bzg]

cc @lebaudantoine 👀

[arnaud-robin]

Thank you for your question and for your enthusiasm regarding the project!

Your understanding is correct: the project aims to provide open-source, self-hostable software developed with public European funds, promoting greater independence from non-European providers.

The inclusion of PostHog analytics was primarily chosen out of convenience since the product is still very young. It allowed developers and maintainers to quickly gain insights into usage patterns, helping us iteratively improve the product at this early stage.

For the near future, my personal take on this is:

• We should design our analytics system to rely on a clearly defined abstraction layer or interface that allows plugging in various analytics providers, with PostHog as just one possible implementation of this abstract interface.
• Right now, this abstraction is not fully fleshed out, and I would personally like to work further on improving it to make it genuinely flexible and community-friendly.
• We should change the Helm chart towards a more agnostic setup in the future, further decoupling it from specific analytics providers.

We warmly encourage and welcome community contributions, including PRs to integrate additional analytics providers—particularly European or self-hosted alternatives—via the abstraction layer. 

Currently, the core development team plans to continue using PostHog Cloud as the primary analytics service for the French Gov installation. This choice is driven by convenience, maturity, and the need to quickly inform product decisions. However, the community is encouraged and fully supported in suggesting, implementing, and maintaining alternative analytics solutions.

Regarding GitHub: currently, GitHub offers significant advantages for collaboration and visibility, particularly in international contexts. Although some of our other projects are hosted on GitLab, we've noticed challenges when collaborating with international contributors and developers. Nonetheless, we remain open to exploring and evaluating EU-based platforms or other alternatives if there's strong community interest and tangible benefits from making such a transition.

Feel free to share your thoughts or submit PRs addressing these aspects!

[virgile-dev]

@xchangeee renamed your issue, I hope that's ok! Thanks for filing it