Hi Ray,

thanks for your note and encouragement!

We've had some early discussions around how we release - this still has to be fleshed out somewhat but we're definitely keen to enlist beta testers. There have been several people in the community and we'll get back to everyone individually. It's likely that we will host a public sandpit for testing purposes; we just need to work through some of the details on where to host this and whether / how we build in automatic resets of the database etc. I think we'll have some more news on this before the end of November.

As for timeframes, we are playing it relatively safe and are saying that our v0.1 pilot will be out before the end of the year. Behind the scenes, we have some (VERY) early users already but we're giving them a lot of support and unfortunately, this is not something we can scale up and offer to the community and wider public just yet - at least not without totally derailing the project :-)

We're also starting to think about what we would like the engagement of beta testers to look like. This will likely mean there will be some briefings (and 'mild' expectations) of the beta testers, too. (e.g. on how and where to report issues etc).

For now, thank you very much for the offer and I hope we can take you up on this before the end of the year.

All the best,
Sven