Leads on New Fedora Community Members, and DuraCloud Possibilities
November, 2009
- Rolf Brugger, SWITCH Rolf runs the learning objects repository at SWITCH which is a national higher-ed consortium for Switzerland. They are long-time Fedora users who participate on mailing lists, etc. He pulled together the large group of Fedora users that I first started discussing with Tobias Wildi (see March 2009, Docuteam) last spring. I discussed starting up a users group for Switzerland with him and there was interest. It is relatively easy for everyone to get together for a one-day meeting and get home in the evening. Don't know if there is any direct possiblities for DuraCloud here, but he is very well connected nationwide, so could help point to possibilities.
- Eric Kansa, School of Information at Berkeley Eric is the director of a program that collects lots of data from small archaeological projects for long-term sustaining; very oriented to getting the stuff out in a sustainable way, not a dark archive. He collects lots of FileMaker, Access, etc. databases and converts them to a data model that is very Fedora-ready. He is potentially a very good possibility for DuraCloud too. I think he has strong ties to Cliff Lynch.
- Ortwin Dally, Deutsches Archäologisches Institut Ortwin is with the DAI in Berlin. The are the national organization that funds the various schools that Germany runs around the world. (The American School is the only one not funded by the government of the 10 or so in Athens.) This was the first meeting of the German and American School to look into cooperating and collaborating. The DAI is very interested in Fedora. I am trying to work out a visit to them in Berlin in the spring. Can't get them to pay travel but they will pick up local expenses. I don't think that there is much possibility for the DuraCloud service here but they could an interesting use case for the software in-house.
- Jack Davis, American School for Classical Studies at Athens Jack is the Director of the School in Athens. He is a very computer savvy archaeologist. The American School has ambitious plans for digital libraries, but very limited IT resources. The organization is a private consortium of American universities, with a very large managing board made up of faculty from the universities. The are VERY shy of adding any positions for IT. The School is the repository for several major and many minor digs in Greece (with increasing large collections of born-digital), they have two libraries with significant rare materials, and a large archive that incudes both the school and what is seen to be the Greek national archive for papers of famous people. They are a good possibility for Fedora in the longer run. This meeting was a joint meeting with the German School in Athens to begin to look into possible joint solutions to durable information systems. It seems to me that the School is a potential DuraCloud customer, possibly sooner if it were just for replication of stuff in Greece at locations in North America. It will require some education/outreach to board members who are here in the States.
- Eric Kansa, School of Information at Berkeley
- Ortwin Dally, Deutsches Archäologisches Institut
- Jack Davis, American School for Classical Studies at Athens
October, 2009
- Lee Namba, ATOS Origin I met Lee when I was consulting with ATOS for the BNF project.He has now moved to running a programming group that works with Roger's area. We are planning a talk with him and whoever he brings next week to go over the OSGi stuff (Eddie and Chris will do a briefing0 but also to talk about what they can do on the next two releases to keep Eddie and Chris free to continue concentrating on OSGi. Chris and I agree that we will position this like we would with anyone else proving themselves to be committers: doing good work to establish the trust, then bring someone in from ATOS as a committer.
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