This is the June 2016 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 [1], please add a comment to a ticket and we can work together to move your interest forward.
Software development
Standards
Fedora API Specification
The Fedora community is working to establish a clearly defined specification for the core Fedora services [2]. This specification will detail the exact services and interactions required for a server implementation to be verified as "doing Fedora". A meeting was held [3] to discuss moving the versioning specification [4] forward as an implementation of the Memento protocol [5]. This proposal was met with agreement, so the draft specification has been moved into GitHub [6] and published [7].
You are invited to comment on and contribute to the draft specifications [8].
Release Candidate Policy
In an effort to make the Fedora release process more consistent and predicatable, a new release candidate policy [9] has been established. In summary, the policy states that major and minor Fedora releases will have three weeks of public testing, whereas point or bug releases may have a shorter period. Additionally, the mailing lists that will be notified of the availability of release candidates are detailed.
Community-driven Activity
API Extension Architecture
The API-X effort continues to move forward at a strong pace. At the last meeting [10] concrete plans to develop a number of extensions were discussed, including binary derivation and package ingest. Issues [11] in the GitHub tracker were assigned to be worked on over the next two weeks. If you are interested in the API Extension Architecture, please join the discussion on the fedora-community mailing list [12] and attend the next meeting.
Performance and Scalability
A Performance and Scalability report [13] was published in May to document the group's work to date and future work. A number of test scenarios have already been run and the results are linked from the report.
If you are interested in Performance and Scalability, please join the discussion on the fedora-community mailing list [14] and attend the next meeting [15] on June 24.
Conferences and events
Upcoming Events
Open Repositories
Open Repositories [16] kicks off next month and there will be many Fedora-related workshops, presentations, and posters at the conference. We’ve counted 6 workshops, 35 presentations of various types, and 5 posters - you can find a complete list [17] on the wiki. We'll also be unveiling a new Fedora T-Shirt - be sure to grab one before we run out!
Islandora Camp BC
Islandora Camp [18] is returning to Vancouver for the second iCampBC, July 18 - 20. All West Coast Islandorians and anyone else who would like to see beautiful British Columbia while learning about Islandora are welcome to attend.
Previous Events
LPForum
David Wilcox, Fedora product manager led a workshop entitled, Publishing Assets as Linked Data with Fedora 4 [19] at the Library Publishing Forum [20] held at the University of North Texas Libraries, Denton, Texas on May 18.
TCDL
Andrew Woods, Fedora technical lead, offered a Fedora 4 workshop [21] at the Texas Conference on Digital Libraries [22] on Tuesday, May 24. The workshop was well-attended by participants who are currently using Fedora 4.
References
[1] https://jira.duraspace.org/issues/?filter=13122 [2] https://wiki.duraspace.org/display/FEDORAAPI/Fedora+Specification [3] https://wiki.duraspace.org/display/FF/2016-05-03+Fedora+Versioning+Review+Meeting [4] https://docs.google.com/document/d/1wpEVG3fNUYWNSmNdNIwTHEujhg-CAQf3hLKszfjpNO4 [5] http://mementoweb.org/guide/rfc/ [6] https://github.com/fcrepo/fcrepo-specification [7] http://fedora.info/spec/resource-versioning [8] https://wiki.duraspace.org/display/FEDORAAPI/Specification+Draft [9] https://wiki.duraspace.org/display/FF/Policy+-+Release+Candidates [10] https://wiki.duraspace.org/display/FF/2016-05-26+Fedora+API+Extensions+Meeting [11] https://github.com/fcrepo4-labs/fcrepo-api-x/issues [12] https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/fedora-community [13] https://wiki.duraspace.org/display/FF/2016-05+Performance+and+Scalability+Report [14] https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/fedora-community [15] https://wiki.duraspace.org/display/FF/2016-06-24+Performance+-+Scale+meeting [16] http://or2016.net/ [17] https://wiki.duraspace.org/display/FF/2016-06+Open+Repositories [18] http://islandora.ca/camps/bc2016 [19] http://www.librarypublishing.org/events/lpforum16/program/publishing-assets-fedora-4 [20] http://www.librarypublishing.org/events/lpforum16 [21] https://conferences.tdl.org/tcdl/index.php/TCDL/index/pages/view/2016-workshops [22] https://conferences.tdl.org/tcdl/index.php/TCDL/TCDL2016
