This is the June 2020 edition of the Fedora Newsletter. This newsletter summarizes the most significant activities within the Fedora community over the last month.
News
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Call for Proposals: Online Fedora Users Group Meeting
The first Online Fedora Users Group Meeting will take place the week of August 10 over several days. This meeting is free and open to anyone who would like to attend; it will provide an opportunity for members of the Fedora community to connect, share information, and provide updates on local projects and initiatives. This meeting will be based around American time zones, but anyone is welcome to attend. We are also planning a future meeting that will be based around European timezones.
If you would like to present at the Online Fedora Users Group, please complete the online form.
Fedora Migration Utility and Search Demos
We put together another two more Fedora 6 demo video videos to showcase a recently added featurefeatures. In this the first video, Peter Winckles from the University of Wisconsin-Madison demonstrates the updated Fedora 3 to 6 migration utility, which can now produce Fedora 6-compliant OCFL Objects that can be viewed and managed in the Fedora 6 application.
You can find the demo video on YouTube..
In the second video, Danny Bernstein, Fedora Tech Lead, demonstrates the new simple search functionality, which provides a built-in search API for basic queries.
You can find the simple search demo video on YouTube.
These demos follow This demo follows previous videos where we demonstrated creating Fedora resources via the API and seeing those resources represented on disk as OCFL Objects, how to create and manage archival groups, and how to rebuild your repository from the Fedora 6 OCFL Objects.
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We'd like to thank the following people and their institutions for contributing to the latest code sprintsprints:
- Danny Bernstein, LYRASIS
- Ben Pennell, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
- Jon Roby, University of Manitoba
- Jared Whiklo, University of Manitoba
- Peter Winckles, University of Wisconsin-Madison
- Andrew Woods, LYRASIS
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- Implementation of a simple, built-in search endpoint
- Support for conducting fixity checks on-demand
- Multiple database support for the containment index
- Completion of the Web Access Control implementation
Another sprint demo is forthcoming. We'd like to thank the following people and their institutions for participating in the sprint:
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Through December of 2020 we will be holding one-week-long Fedora 6 mini-sprints during the first week of each month.
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The next sprint will take place July 6-10. Please add your name to any of the upcoming sprint dates on the wiki.
Changing ‘master’ branch to ‘main’ in GitHub
The Fedora Committers team voted to approve a change to the Fedora GitHub repository: the ‘master’ branch will be renamed to ‘main’. This small change, which can be implemented easily without negatively impacting development processes, was suggested after members of the Fedora Leadership Group shared some materials on changing nomenclature used in software development. Specifically, the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) recommends changing the master-slave metaphor because "Master-slave is an oppressive metaphor that will and should never become fully detached from history" as well as "In addition to being inappropriate and arcane, the master-slave metaphor is both technically and historically inaccurate." Several other open source software communities, including Django, Drupal, and Python, have already made similar changes. GitHub plans to implement this change more broadly in the near future.
Activities in Related Communities
Islandora
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- The Islandora Foundation launched a new website. Any feedback can be provided via this form.
- ISLE 1.5.0 has been released.
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- Samvera Virtual Connect conference recordings are now available.
- Nominations for the The Samvera Steering Group are open until June 7has convened a 2020 Fundraising Team.
Oxford Common File Layout
The latest OCFL community meeting took place on May 13June 10. Notes and video from the call are available online. The meeting focused on updates on recent validator and related specification work, discussion and agreement on two open specification issues (issue-461 & issue-462), interest in having the extension mechanism defined as soon as possible, and the 1.0 release, which is primarily waiting on completion of validator-related workeditorial updates, including discussion around releasing 1.0 and finalizing a validator, and discussion around open tickets and pull requests. The next community call will take place on June 10July 8.
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!
Islandora Online
Islandora Online will take place throughout July. It is a series four online events, around five hours each (including breaks), focused on a specific topic of interest to the Islandora community. Each event contains a mix of presentations, panel discussions, and small group discussions, with optional social events during breaks. More details, including registration information, will be available soon.
Online Fedora Users Group Meeting
The first Online Fedora Users Group Meeting will take place the week of August 10 over several days. This meeting is free and open to anyone who would like to attend; it will provide an opportunity for members of the Fedora community to connect, share information, and provide updates on local projects and initiatives. If you would like to present at the Online Fedora Users Group, please complete this form.
Membership
Fedora is funded entirely through the contributions of members that allocate their annual funding to Fedora. This year's membership campaign has a goal of raising $500,000 to fund 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!
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