Welcome to the November issue of the Fedora Newsletter. This is a summary of events and information that have happened throughout our community in the past month. We’ve included links to some further reading for your interest.
News
Welcome: Arran Griffith, Fedora Program Coordinator
We welcomed Arran Griffith to the Fedora team this month in the role of part-time Program Coordinator to work alongside David Wilcox, Program Leader. Arran will be working to support the Governance Groups as well as helping promote community engagement. Please feel free to reach out to her for any questions at arran.griffith@gmail.com.
IMLS Grant Update: Fedora Migration Paths and Tools
This grant (lg-246264-ols-20) is focused on developing, piloting, and documenting migration tools and paths for upgrading Fedora 3 repositories to Fedora 6. Fedora staff and the grant partners have been working hard on this project and are pleased to share the following updates:
- We established a spreadsheet of functional requirements for the Whitman College pilot that includes priorities, solutions, and timelines
- We scoped and produced an initial design for a migration validation tool
- We ran migration tests for the University of Virginia pilot using sample data from their legacy Fedora 3 repository. We encountered and documented several issues to be shared as part of a case study
Stay tuned for further updates as the work progresses!
Fedora 6 Progress
With only a few months left before the end of the year we have been continuing monthly community sprints, targeting a potential Fedora 6 Beta release before year end. If you are interested in the upcoming Fedora release and would like to help with testing, documenting, and/or developing Fedora, please join an upcoming sprint.
The outcomes of October's sprint include:
- Migration tooling completed for F4 & F5 → F6
- Native S3 Support is now available
- Support now exists for DirectContainers
- Versions/Mementos are now displayed and can be created in the UI
- Metrics collection added. See details on wiki
- Alignment with Fedora API Specification: 93% complete
With all of this progress, the hope is that following our November sprint (Nov 2-6) we will be able to release the alpha version of Fedora 6 for testing.
Requirements for alpha release are as follows:
- Mostly feature complete = ✓
- Migration tooling for F3,F4,F5 -> F6 = ✓
- Documentation required for the following:
- Documented API compliance of Alpha
- Documented missing features of Alpha
- Documented breaking changes of Alpha
- Documented upgrade process of Alpha
To join a futures sprint, please add your name to any of the upcoming sprint dates on the wiki.
Activities in Related Communities
Islandora
- Started regular quarterly sprints on ISLE for Islandora 8 - upcoming sprint info here
- It has recently transitioned from an ICG/Born Digital collab to a full community project
- Islandora 8 is now available on Docker and instructions can be found here.
- New committers to Islandora 8: Don Richards, Willow Gillingham
- Documentation Interest Group (DIG) started up again this month hosting 2 meetings in October
Samvera
- Samvera Connect successfully wrapped up!
- Conference program and related content are available here
- Samvera Developer Congress will take place Nov 16-18 virtually.
Oxford Common File Layout
- Community meeting took place on Oct 14, 2020
- OCFL is a finalist for this year’s Digital Preservation Awards
- Next meeting is Nov 11, 2020 4pm BST/11am EDT/8am PDT
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!
DLF Forum
This year’s DLF Forum will take place virtually from November 9-13, 2020. All details can be found here.
Samvera Developer Congress
Normally taking place immediately following Samvera Connect, the Developer Congress has been moved to November 16-18, 2020. All the info for registering or submitting a topic for discussion can be found here.
SWIB 2020
Semantic Web Libraries is hosting its event virtually this year from November 23-27, 2020. David Wilcox will be presenting a Fedora workshop and all the rest of the agenda is available online.
Open Repositories 2021
Open Repositories was moved to an entirely virtual event for 2021 and will sadly no longer take place in Stellenbosch, South Africa. A date has yet to be determined, but the organizers are working with those who had proposals previously accepted or deferred to help transition to the online event.
Membership
Fedora is funded entirely through the contributions of members that allocate their annual funding to Fedora. This funding supports full-time staff to work on Fedora 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 in support of Fedora, please join us today!
Register Your Repository
Is your repository listed in the registry? Help us maintain reliable information on the community of Fedora users around the world by registering your repository today. You can also request an update to an existing entry by selecting your entry and filling out the online form.
Get Involved
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.
