This is the October 2017 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. The 2016 membership campaign concluded with $564,750 in funding and 74 members. The 2017 membership campaign kicked off in May, and so far the Fedora project has raised $552,250 from 74 members. The annual goal this year is $580,000, so we are over 95% of the way there. We will continue to coordinate with members of the Fedora Leadership Group to expand the pool of DuraSpace members supporting the Fedora project and build a sustainable funding base for the future. If your institution is not yet a member of DuraSpace in support of Fedora, please join us!
Software development
Standards
Fedora API Specification
The initial public working draft of the Fedora API Specification is still available for broader public review.
As described in the specification charter, this specification is designed to:
- Define the characteristics and expectations of how clients interact with Fedora implementations
- Define such interactions such that an implementation’s conformance is testable
- Enable interoperability by striving to minimize the need for modifications to client applications in order to work with different implementations of the Fedora API specification
The initial working draft will remain open for public comment until November, at which time we are planning to graduate the specification to a “candidate recommendation”. Please contact the Fedora Community or Fedora Specification Editors with any general comments or if you would like to participate in implementation and/or test suite sprints. Any comments on details of the specification, itself, should be posted as GitHub issues.
Community-driven Activity
API Alignment Sprints
Oxford Common Filesystem
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 .
Previous Events
PASIG
The Preservation and Archiving Special Interest Group meeting took place September 11-13 at Oxford University. Erin Tripp, DuraSpace Business Development Manager, attended and presented on DuraCloud and Fedora. She wrote a report on the meeting which can be found on the DuraSpace website.
RDA 10th Plenary Meeting
The 10th Research Data Alliance Plenary Meeting took place September 19-21 in Montreal, Quebec. The meeting featured several group discussions relevant to Fedora, including the Research Data Repository Interoperability working group and the Repository Platforms for Research Data interest group. David Wilcox, Fedora Product Manager, attended and presented on Fedora, Samvera, and Islandora in the context of data repositories. The Fedora Import/Export Utility was also featured in discussions on repository interoperability with regard to BagIt packages.
iPRES
The 14th International Conference on Digital Preservation took place September 25-29 in Kyoto, Japan. David Wilcox attended to present on Fedora and Data Migrations and to lead a Fedora workshop. The conference provided many opportunities to learn about institutional digital preservation practices, particularly in East and Southeast Asia. There were notable commonalities with the work of the Research Data Alliance as well, as evidenced by the keynote presentation on FAIR Data in Trustworthy Data Repositories by Ingrid Dillo.
