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  1. What did you hear today?
  2. What do you have concerns about?
  3. What has inspired you?
  4. What unanswered questions do you have?

Table reports

 

Fedora Futures session

Eddie via Skype from Singapore: "The sun never sets on the Fedora empire."

Jonathan: Why are we talking about FF now?

  • Interesting model for doing this kind of work
  • Born at OR2012
  • At the end of the conference "community-managed projects" concept was discussed
  • Towards the end of the conf about 8 stakeholders came to DuraSpace and said we need to talk about Fedora improvements now
  • Functionally and technically it could not meet emerging use cases
  • Very old code and hard to get new developers to work on Fedora
  • Financial and developer resources were pledged by this group
  • Still in early phases of the FF project
  • Not happening in a dark room; happening among all community; trying to find ways to bring in the larger community
  • Current Fedora 3 will morph into Fedora 4
  • Will be talking about governance tomorrow about Fedora

 Tom Cramer, Project overview 

  • Funding history of Fedora
  • 2000-2008 with 2.4M from the Mellon Foundation; $500,000 from UVA Library
  • Now work with distributed committers from 10 institutions
  • Fedora is a success; arch is flexible and extensible
  • Provides support for durability
  • One foot in the linked data world
  • decade of maturity and proven use
  • Sub-community of adopters contrib and vendors
  • More than a decade of use
  • Widespread enterprise repositories
  • Rainbows and ponies all around
  • Looming storm clouds
  • Nervousness on part of big universities
  • Never been easy to use
  • Code base is old
  • Developer contributions have fallen off
  • Hard to recruit new developers
  • Not a sexy thing because it's mature
  • Beginning to realize there is not a crisis now, but there will be in 2 years
  • Other web services DB are emerging
  • Chinese character for crisis and danger is also opportunity
  • New front-ends
  • New web arch and horizontal scaling
  • Data management mandates are a good fit
  • Fedora 4 "preservation enabled"; integration with AWS Glacier
  • Challenges
  • Communications--how to talk about it in the community; engaging people at all levels in non-technical terms
  • Meta-issues; digital preservation issues in general
  • How is money flowing?
  • All money we are collecting for FF goes to Fedora development; last year was paid for by sponsorship; sub-project under Fedora
  • Is Fedora Futures the right name? Discussion about not fragmenting the community--interest in making sure there is a path forward
  • FF group would like to see the current governance model subsumed by what comes out of this meeting
  • FF is the steering and vision around what Fedora should be; vision for DSpace has not been articulated
  • Challenge is that DuraSpace will not do that for you; governance could be the answer or the way forward to create a vision
  • Cost of ownership piece--too important to fail; curious about what proportion of F3 is in F4; If the 5.4M was not enough to endow the project what is enough
  • If we know what the community needs we can scope it out then we can plan for it; what do we want fedora to be over the next 10 years?

Eddie Shin, Tech overview

  • Existing set of things that we have found out about from the community that we are working on
  • Put 95% of F3 in 2 days into F4
  • Not positive that we should carry some things forward lie XCML in its current form
  • Why not do more roadmap development; trying to avoid the mistakes of the past of going dark and then doing the big reveal to find out that it's not what you want
  • We should build quickly with quantifiable experiments and get early feedback from the community (Eddie)
  • Metrics and reporting: as academia changes how people are evaluated then we get to be part of the infrastructure of the university; are you working with others on what a usage report would look like? Should be part of requirements development
  • Partial effort to gather input from users--survey or something?
  • Phone, wiki, conf call are not that good?
  • Should we do a face-to-face hackathon for non-developers; need a deep conversation about what the user community needs

What have you heard?

  • makes me want to contribute more back  (need to do a little clean up) instead of working on something else (Sid from Rice)
  • we knew this day was coming – funded thru grants, at some point something needs to change – this is it – the point where we have to step up a little bit
  • distribute slides: want numbers – Tyler Walters slides 1.4 FTE – spending so little money in this area, that we need more allocated – I want to double what we spend
  • grant $s get whacked by research office – 50% taken off – can’t some of that money help the projects?
  • need to make the case that we aren’t just books and stacks
  • terminology does matter – project/product/program – maybe program is better – program that spins off projects
  • DuraSpace hasn’t broght some of these concerns sooner – need to know what the challnges are we Fedora
  • Fedora needs to be backward compatable
  • really keen to do open source except when it gets hard
  • what is the governance model – how do we make it better
  • funding modeles and ROI – we are the choir, we are making the case at our institutions
  • governanace/stakeholder engagement – project level and DuraSpace, moving from appointed to elected boards – have some people involved besides just technical
  • more communication for roadmapping - 
  • F & D community can’t sit still
  • heard fin position
  • surpised that projects are in the red and that it isn’t a problem
  • how do we get general presevation problem funded – long term access might be a better way to think about it – current $s vs endowment – and other funding for the whole stack
  • both projects are mature, dev is difuse, might not be a good dvelopmetn strategy – look at other models – consolidating resources to make pushes (like Kuali) –
  • governance – how to dev roapmap
  • developing a common pitch for provost

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