This is the December 2018 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. We began our annual membership campaign with a goal of raising $570,000, and so far we have raised $529,625 which is 93% of our goal! This funding pays for staff to work on the project 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 of DuraSpace in support of Fedora, please join us today!
Designing a Migration Path Grant Update
The Designing a Migration Path grant work proceeded this month with the completion of an environmental scan. This report has been shared with the advisory board for feedback and review, after which it will be shared publicly.
An in-person advisory group meeting will be held following the CNI Fall Membership Meeting in December. Keep an eye on this newsletter for monthly updates on our progress.
Software development
Standards
Fedora API Specification
The Proposed Recommendation of the Fedora API Specification is still available for public review.
This release should be considered stable. No other updates are expected before the official 1.0 Recommendation.
Minimum requirements for releasing the 1.0 Recommendation include:
- Specification compliance test suite
- Two or more implementations of the specification
- No unresolved, outstanding critical issues, as defined by the specification editors
Please contact the Fedora Community or Fedora Specification Editors with any general comments. Any comments on details of the specification, itself, should be posted as GitHub issues.
Community-driven Activity
Fedora 5.0 Release Candidate
The third Fedora 5.0.0 release candidate is available for testing. Pending any issues discovered in the testing of the release candidate, the 5.0.0 release is planned for Dec 14, 2018.
The primary features/updates found in this release include:
- Alignment with the Fedora API Specification 1.0 which includes the implementation of the following web standards:
- Memento (versioning)
- SOLID/WEB (web access control)
- Activity Streams (notifications)
- Modeshape is no longer used for versioning and access control
The following is a full list of JIRA tickets found in this release:
The latest and greatest documentation can be found on the wiki.
There are several ways you can test this release candidate:
Please provide your feedback on the release testing page.
Fedora 5.x Documentation
In tandem with the release candidate, we are reviewing and updating the project documentation for the 5.0.0 release. Creating and maintaining accurate and up-to-date documentation is equally as important as software development, so please contribute to this effort.
Oxford Common File Layout
A 0.1 (Alpha) release of the OCFL spec was recently announced. You are invited to provide feedback, which will be discussed on the next community call on January 9.
The most recent OCFL call took place on Wednesday, November 14. Notes and audio are available online. This call included an open question regarding support for empty directories, interest in a machine-readable means for identifying storage hierarchy pattern, and a roadmap for the specification. Please join the ocfl-community mailing list for further updates.
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!
Upcoming Events
South Central States Fedora User Group Meeting
The next South Central States Fedora User Group Meeting will be held January 16-17 at the University of Texas at Austin. The meeting will include presentations on current implementations and work underway at peer institutions, discussion for users considering Fedora, and Fedora 5.0 updates and a workshop. This meeting is free to attend but please register in advance.
Past Events
SWIB18
SWIB conference (Semantic Web in Libraries) is an annual conference, held for the 10th time on November 26-28, focusing on Linked Open Data (LOD) in libraries and related organizations. This year's programme featured a Fedora workshop along with a presentation on using Fedora and Islandora CLAW to power linked open data applications. A group of current and prospective Fedora users in the region also met during a breakout for a brief user group meeting.
