This is the November 2018 edition of the Fedora Newsletter. This newsletter summarizes the most significant activities within the Fedora community over the last month.
Call for Action
Fedora is designed, built, used, and supported by the community. An easy and important way that you can contribute to the effort is by helping resolve outstanding bugs. If you have an interest in gaining a better understanding of the Fedora code base, or a specific interest in any of these bugs, please add a comment to a ticket and we can work together to move your interest forward.
Membership
Fedora is funded entirely through the contributions of DuraSpace members that allocate their annual funding to Fedora. We began our annual membership campaign with a goal of raising $570,000, and so far we have raised $528,792 which is over 92% of our goal! This funding pays for staff to work on the project and provide technical leadership, direct strategic planning, organize community outreach, and coordinate timely software releases. Membership also provides opportunities to participate in project governance and influence the direction of the software. If your institution is not yet a member of DuraSpace in support of Fedora, please join us today!
New Members
We would like to welcome the University of Vienna as our newest DuraSpace member in support of Fedora! We appreciate their generous contribution to DuraSpace and Fedora. Information on membership levels and benefits can be found on the DuraSpace website.
Designing a Migration Path Grant Update
The Designing a Migration Path grant work proceeded this month with an environmental scan. The advisory group assembled a list of relevant articles and blog posts, and the project team began reviewing the literature and drafting a report. This report will be made available once it is complete.
An in-person advisory group meeting will be held following the CNI Fall Membership Meeting in December. Keep an eye on this newsletter for monthly updates on our progress.
Software development
Standards
Fedora API Specification
The second Candidate Recommendation of the Fedora API Specification is still available for public review.
This release should be considered stable in so far as the only potential revisions will come from the feedback of implementers of the Candidate Recommendation.
Minimum requirements for releasing the 1.0 Recommendation include:
- Specification compliance test suite
- Two or more implementations of the specification
- No unresolved, outstanding critical issues, as defined by the specification editors
Please contact the Fedora Community or Fedora Specification Editors with any general comments. Any comments on details of the specification, itself, should be posted as GitHub issues.
Community-driven Activity
Fedora 5.0 Release Candidate
The Fedora 5.0.0 release candidate is available for testing. Pending any issues discovered in the testing of the release candidate, the 5.0.0 release is planned for Dec 3, 2018.
The primary features/updates found in this release include:
- Alignment with the Fedora API Specification 1.0 which includes the implementation of the following web standards:
- Memento (versioning)
- SOLID/WEB (web access control)
- Activity Streams (notifications)
- Modeshape is no longer used for versioning and access control
The following is a full list of JIRA tickets found in this release:
The latest and greatest documentation can be found on the wiki.
There are several ways you can test this release candidate:
Please provide your feedback on the release testing page.
Fedora 5.x Documentation
In tandem with the release candidate, we are reviewing and updating the project documentation for the 5.0.0 release. Creating and maintaining accurate and up-to-date documentation is equally as important as software development, so please contribute to this effort.
Oxford Common File Layout
A 0.1 (Alpha) release of the OCFL spec was recently announced. You are invited to provide feedback, which will be discussed on the next community call on November 14.
The most recent OCFL call took place on Wednesday, October 10. Notes and audio are available online. This call included a notice of "inventory" change from JSON-LD to JSON and a release plan for Alpha, Beta, and beyond. Please join the ocfl-community mailing list for further updates.
Conferences and events
In an attempt to simplify the task of keeping up with Fedora-related meetings and events, a Fedora calendar is available to the community as HTML and iCal .
If you have not already joined the fedora-project Slack workspace please start by visiting the self-registration form. Come join the conversation!
Upcoming Events
SWIB18
SWIB conference (Semantic Web in Libraries) is an annual conference, being held for the 10th time, focusing on Linked Open Data (LOD) in libraries and related organizations. This year's programme will feature a Fedora workshop along with a presentation on using Fedora and Islandora CLAW to power linked open data applications.
South Central States Fedora User Group Meeting
The next South Central States Fedora User Group Meeting will be held January 16-17 at the University of Texas at Austin. The meeting will include presentations on current implementations and work underway at peer institutions, discussion for users considering Fedora, and Fedora 5.0 updates and a workshop. This meeting is free to attend but please register in advance.
Past Events
Samvera Connect
Samvera Connect took place October 9-12 in Salt Lake City, Utah. Samvera Project participants gathered with an emphasis on synchronizing efforts, technical development, plans, and community links. This year's conference featured a Fedora workshop delivered by David Wilcox, along with an update on the Fedora 5.0 release and API specification.
Fedora and Samvera Camp in Berlin
DuraSpace and Data Curation Experts led a Fedora and Samvera Camp at the Berlin State Library on November 5 – 8, 2018. We had a great turnout with 20 attendees - slides and other resources can be found on the wiki. Thanks to everyone who came out, and to our fantastic hosts at the Berlin State Library!
Islandora Camp San Diego
The last Islandora Camp of 2018 took place in sunny San Diego, CA from November 7 to 9, hosted by San Diego State University. The camp featured general and introductory sessions about the software and the community that uses and supports it, hands-on workshop training with tracks for Developers and front-end Administrative users, featuring both Islandora 7.x and Islandora CLAW, and sessions on specific sites, tools, and topics of interest to Islandora users. Slides from the sessions can be found on the camp web page.
