Date

03 Feb 2020

Attendees

• Kurt Ewoldsen

• John Kunze

• Kate Wittenberg

Goals

• Determine the future of this working group, based on the recent input from CDL and the Advisory Group.

Background for Discussion

In the final Sustainability working group meeting of last year, it was expressed that our “go to market” membership pitch needed to include a statement about how CDL was “pulling back”, therefore leaving a vacancy for the ARK community to fill.  This statement needed to walk the fine line between causing panic in the community and getting their attention and involvement, explaining to them why we are approaching them to step up their involvement and investment.  I took this request back to CDL leadership and it spawned a great deal of discussion, assessment and re-evaluation.  I won’t bore you with the details, but ultimately it was agreed that such a statement was disingenuous and misleading, based on the current intentions of CDL.  Instead, we referenced some of our earliest objectives (as captured on the AITO wiki) and (re)assert the following.

• CDL is committed to the ARK identifier, which is incorporated into several of our service offerings
• CDL is committed to the EZID identifier service and the N2T identifier resolver, which again support several of our internal service offerings

OK, then we are back to the question of what CDL is asking for, and our three primary objectives are:

• Assistance with promoting the ARK specification to a formal Internet standard.  This work is happening in the Technical working group (John Kunze can provide a quick status update).
• Assistance with managing the NAAN registry; fulfilling requests for new prefixes and acting as a central point of contact.  We are reaching out to suitable individuals to get a commitment to participate in this activity and commence training on the process.  This only requires a half dozen people and the burden is very light.
• Several partners to run redundant global ARK resolvers to reduce the sole dependency on N2T in the event that it is not available at any time.  This is the most difficult ask, as most ARL users run their own infrastructure and are not reliant on a “global” resolver.  However, we feel that there are enough dependencies on this function to make it important to the community as a whole.

In addition, we ask community members to help with promotion and outreach activities around the ARK identifier.  This work is happening with good progress made in the Outreach working group, with a thorough FAQ completed (in English & now translated into French) and work commencing on bringing Wikipedia up to date.

We are also interested in community partners for grant opportunities, focused on the technical activities of creating the next generation of ARK resolver and identifier management.

Given this restatement of goals, we don’t see a compelling case (or need) for a fee-based membership drive at this time.

Given all of that, what does this mean for the Sustainability working group?  Should it be disbanded, re-focused on finding grant partners, or something else?  Also, is there enough overlap with the Advisory Group that whatever tasks are appropriate for this working group can happen there instead?  Let’s discuss and propose a way forward…

Discussion items

Action items

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