Each year, the Fedora community continues to grow. We discover new and unique use cases every day. Our community supports and learns from one another and community engagement has expanded beyond the confines of Slack and listservs, to conferences and in-person events where we are connecting with our community face-to-face. FY2022-2023 is a year we should celebrate, and I would invite you look through our program highlights from the last year.
Virtual Fedora Showcase
This virtual event took place over 3, half days online and brought users together to share their work, discuss implementation successes and challenges and meet new members. With over 100 individuals registered, the event was a huge success for our community and we look forward to the 2024 Virtual Fedora Showcase.
Welcomed Dan Field
In January 2023 we welcomed Dan Field to the Fedora program team as a part time developer. Dan brings extensive experience in software engineering from the Cultural Heritage sector and has worked with Fedora at the National Library of Wales for over 15 years. He travelled to Open Repositories in South Africa in June 2023 to present on behalf of Fedora and had his first opportunity to meet Fedora users in-person as a representative of the program. We are thrilled to have him on board and working alongside our Committers and Technical Team.
Technology Successes
Fedora 6.4 & 6.5 Releases
Between March 2023 and Feb 2024, the Fedora Committers, Tech Team and Program Developer released Fedora 6.4.0 and 6.5.0, incorporating a wide range of community feature requests, bug fixes and optimizations. Full release notes can be found here (6.4.0) and here (6.5.0). During the most current release (6.5.0), updates were also done for fcrepo-camel toolbox, fcrepo-migration-utils, fcrepo-upgrade-utils, fcrepo-import-export and fcrepo-migration-validator.
Critical Vulnerability Patch Release
In late 2023 a critical vulnerability exposure (CVE) was identified in fcrepo-core that was impacting all versions of the software. A team of 2-3 committers, along with the Fedora Program Developer were able to deliver patch releases for nearly all affected versions over the course of a few days. It was because of the immediate action and responsiveness of these individuals, that Fedora users around the world were and still remain protected. A special thank you to everyone who participated in that effort in support of all Fedora users.
Partner Community Engagement Opportunities
In partnership with stakeholders from the Samvera community, the Fedora program team has been actively participating in the Hyrax 6 Fedora WG whose main objective is establishing a pathway to Hyrax 5.x with Fedora 6.x through Valkyrie. Originally intended to scope the work required to achieve this goal, the WG has pivoted to focus on resolving outstanding issues with a Dockerized deployment of Hyrax 5.0, Fedora 6.x and Valkyrie, called Sirenia, and begin early stage performance tests of the system.
Islandora LAC-GLAM Group
Since late 2023, Fedora Program team members regularly participate in this working group within the Islandora community focused on the needs and use cases of smaller Liberal Arts Colleges working on, or migrating too, Islandora 2.0.
As a means of staying closely connected to the Oxford Common File Layout community, Fedora program team members regularly participate in this group, comprised of individuals working with implementations of OCFL-java (both Fedora and non-Fedora related). The group meets quarterly and is always interested in learning about new implementations or use cases for OCFL-java.
As you can see, we have a lot to celebrate and would encourage you to share this great work with your institutional representatives. However these efforts do come at a cost. We rely entirely on financial support of the program through the Fedora Membership Program. Membership represents the sole source of funding to support this program, its staff and operations. Without the financial support of institutions like yourselves we could not continue to engage with our community and the long-term sustainability of Fedora would be at risk. Please consider how you can help, and consider becoming a member.
