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- What did you hear today?
- What do you have concerns about?
- What has inspired you?
- What unanswered questions do you have?
Fedora Futures session
Eddie via Skype from Singapore: "The sun never sets on the Fedora empire."
Jonathan: Why are we talking about FF now?
- Interesting model for doing this kind of work
- Born at OR2012
- At the end of the conference "community-managed projects" concept was discussed
- Towards the end of the conf about 8 stakeholders came to DuraSpace and said we need to talk about Fedora improvements now
- Functionally and technically it could not meet emerging use cases
- Very old code and hard to get new developers to work on Fedora
- Financial and developer resources were pledged by this group
- Still in early phases of the FF project
- Not happening in a dark room; happening among all community; trying to find ways to bring in the larger community
- Current Fedora 3 will morph into Fedora 4
- Will be talking about governance tomorrow about Fedora
Tom Cramer, Project overview
- Funding history of Fedora
- 2000-2008 with 2.4M from the Mellon Foundation; $500,000 from UVA Library
- Now work with distributed committers from 10 institutions
- Fedora is a success; arch is flexible and extensible
- Provides support for durability
- One foot in the linked data world
- decade of maturity and proven use
- Sub-community of adopters contrib and vendors
- More than a decade of use
- Widespread enterprise repositories
- Rainbows and ponies all around
- Looming storm clouds
- Nervousness on part of big universities
- Never been easy to use
- Code base is old
- Developer contributions have fallen off
- Hard to recruit new developers
- Not a sexy thing because it's mature
- Beginning to realize there is not a crisis now, but there will be in 2 years
- Other web services DB are emerging
- Chinese character for crisis and danger is also opportunity
- New front-ends
- New web arch and horizontal scaling
- Data management mandates are a good fit
- Fedora 4 "preservation enabled"; integration with AWS Glacier
- Challenges
- Communications--how to talk about it in the community; engaging people at all levels in non-technical terms
- Meta-issues; digital preservation issues in general
- How is money flowing?
- All money we are collecting for FF goes to Fedora development; last year was paid for by sponsorship; sub-project under Fedora
- Is Fedora Futures the right name? Discussion about not fragmenting the community--interest in making sure there is a path forward
- FF group would like to see the current governance model subsumed by what comes out of this meeting
- FF is the steering and vision around what Fedora should be; vision for DSpace has not been articulated
- Challenge is that DuraSpace will not do that for you; governance could be the answer or the way forward to create a vision
- Cost of ownership piece--too important to fail; curious about what proportion of F3 is in F4; If the 5.4M was not enough to endow the project what is enough
- If we know what the community needs we can scope it out then we can plan for it; what do we want fedora to be over the next 10 years?
Eddie Shin, Tech overview
- Existing set of things that we have found out about from the community that we are working on
- Put 95% of F3 in 2 days into F4
- Not positive that we should carry some things forward lie XCML in its current form
- Why not do more roadmap development; trying to avoid the mistakes of the past of going dark and then doing the big reveal to find out that it's not what you want
- We should build quickly with quantifiable experiments and get early feedback from the community (Eddie)
- Metrics and reporting: as academia changes how people are evaluated then we get to be part of the infrastructure of the university; are you working with others on what a usage report would look like? Should be part of requirements development
- Partial effort to gather input from users--survey or something?
- Phone, wiki, conf call are not that good?
- Should we do a face-to-face hackathon for non-developers; need a deep conversation about what the user community needs
What have you heard?
- makes me want to contribute more back (need to do a little clean up) instead of working on something else (Sid from Rice)
- we knew this day was coming – funded thru grants, at some point something needs to change – this is it – the point where we have to step up a little bit
- distribute slides: want numbers – Tyler Walters slides 1.4 FTE – spending so little money in this area, that we need more allocated – I want to double what we spend
- grant $s get whacked by research office – 50% taken off – can’t some of that money help the projects?
- need to make the case that we aren’t just books and stacks
- terminology does matter – project/product/program – maybe program is better – program that spins off projects
- DuraSpace hasn’t broght some of these concerns sooner – need to know what the challnges are we Fedora
- Fedora needs to be backward compatable
- really keen to do open source except when it gets hard
- what is the governance model – how do we make it better
- funding modeles and ROI – we are the choir, we are making the case at our institutions
- governanace/stakeholder engagement – project level and DuraSpace, moving from appointed to elected boards – have some people involved besides just technical
- more communication for roadmapping -
- F & D community can’t sit still
- heard fin position
- surpised that projects are in the red and that it isn’t a problem
- how do we get general presevation problem funded – long term access might be a better way to think about it – current $s vs endowment – and other funding for the whole stack
- both projects are mature, dev is difuse, might not be a good dvelopmetn strategy – look at other models – consolidating resources to make pushes (like Kuali) –
- governance – how to dev roapmap
- developing a common pitch for provost
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