Hi everyone :)
We do want to allow more and more people to run their own Wikibase instance. As part of that we want to allow people to deeply connect these Wikibase instances among each other and especially with Wikidata. We also want to allow them to benefit from work done in other Wikibase instances and especially Wikidata, like the definition and refining of properties. As people talk and think about this it is often referred to as Federation. However there is the problem that we don't talk about the same thing when we say Federation but instead about a multitude of related features. In order to move the development forward we need to sort out what people actually want and need to make sure we're actually developing something useful. I opened a page for collecting your input here:
Cheers Lydia