Fedora Futures @ OR2013

Fedora Futures Developer Workshop
Monday, July 8, 2013 10AM - 12AM
UPEI Aux

Join us from 10:00-12:00 for a technical workshop on the work-in-progress of the next major release of Fedora. Members of the developer team will be on hand to answer questions, and provide guidance on Developer Challenge proposals.

We’ll provide an overview of the software, including major new features, such as:

Clustering
Projecting over existing data sources (aka “instant ingest”)
Native RDF API
Batch operations
Transactions

We’ll also demonstrate how you can extend Fedora 4:

“Drop-in” JAX-RS resources
Via dynamic language support for native Ruby, Python and Scala
External services that consume the REST API
External services that consume Fedora’s messaging service
“Sequencers” that enable services such as metadata extraction, file characterization, generating derivatives (e.g. thumbnails, PDFs), etc.
Demo Hydra and Islandora on top of Fedora 4.

Building Fedora Futures
Thursday, July 11, 2013 2:30PM - 3:00PM
McDonald Ballroom

For the past six months, beginning in January 2013, the Fedora Futures team began development on the next major release of Fedora, Fedora 4. Development of Fedora 4 focuses on three principal objectives: to preserve the strengths of the current Fedora architecture and community to address the needs for robust and full-featured repository services (that are now mature and well-understood, compared to six or twelve years ago) to provide a successful platform for our common use for the next 5-10 years Specific technical goals are driven by new demands to support research data management and for increased scalability and performance. Just as significantly, the development is also driven by the demand to build healthy ecosystem of developers and users that will sustain Fedora’s growth in the years to come. Here we report on the current development status of Fedora 4, its architecture, APIs and services as well as our process and methodology for ongoing development and engagement with the Fedora community.

Repository Redux: The Future of Fedora
Thursday, July 11, 2013 9:30AM - 10:00AM
McDonald Ballroom

Fedora has been an unqualified success in the repository arena. More than twelve years since its inception, the project has seen three major releases, has hundreds of adopters worldwide and a sizeable base of committed institutional sponsors. But despite the project’s demonstrated value and track record, numerous challenges lie ahead of the Fedora community. Fedora’s code base is aging and the developer pool is shrinking, just as new demands around performance, scalability, research data management and linked data are pushing the project more than ever. Over the past eighteen months, members of the Fedora community began to consider the future of the project. In discussions that coalesced at Open Repositories 2012 , the essential question emerged: how best to preserve the Fedora’s community and architecture, while refreshing the code base to meet the emerging challenges of today’s repository landscape? At OR12 a grassroots coalition of Fedora activists and DuraSpace committed to kickstart a three-year effort to write Fedora’s next version, with three principal objectives: 1. to preserve the strengths of the current Fedora architecture and community 2. to address the needs for robust and full-featured repository services (that are now mature and well-understood, compared to six or twelve years ago) 3. to provide a successful platform for our common use for the next 5-10 years This session will give an overview of the project’s drivers, progress to date and plans for the next two years. Speakers for the session will include members of the Fedora Futures Steering Committee and the Fedora community who have contributed as Sponsors of the Project.

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Fedora Futures Project Welcomes New Technical Lead

The DuraSpace organization and the Fedora Futures Project are pleased to announce that Andrew Woods will take over as the new Technical Lead for Fedora effective May 15, 2013. In this role he will provide technical leadership for the Fedora Futures Project. Woods joined the DuraSpace organization in early 2009 as a Fedora committer. Since then he has helped establish the D.C. Area Fedora Users Group, been a project co-lead on DuraCloud, and worked in various technical and advisory capacities within DPN, APTrust, Chronopolis, and NDSA. more ->

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Fedora Repository Futures: Towards an Evolutionary Development Roadmap

In recent months, many members of the Fedora community–both developers and stakeholders–have expressed a desire to refresh the product's vision, and to produce an evolutionary short- and mid-term development roadmap for the repository. The idea here is that while Fedora's conceptual architecture is proven and still sound, the underlying technology needs to become more responsive to a wide range of current and emerging requirements, more performant and scalable, and capable of advancing in a more agile development framework. The feeling is that this work would require considerably more effort and a different approach than is possible using our current model of volunteer developer contributions led and coordinated by the DuraSpace organization.

At the 2012 Open Repositories Conference a group of Fedora stakeholders self-organized to plan some post-conference, informal discussions about "Fedora Futures". That group, encompassing representation from some large institutions, major projects like Hydra, Islandora, APTrust, and eSciDoc, plus DuraSpace, met last week for an initial conversation to explore these topics. The outcome was very positive. The group found a lot of common ground and interest on possible approaches to improving Fedora. Most importantly, a commitment was expressed to mobilize resources in the short term to organize a sustained effort to scale up the development of Fedora.

As this work takes shape, the group will reach out to the wider Fedora community of developers and other institutional stakeholders for feedback, recommendations, and support. This is the place to come for project updates and news

Edwin Shin to be Technical Lead for New and Improved Fedora Repository Platform Initiative

The DuraSpace organization is pleased to announce an agreement with Registered Service Provider MediaShelf (http://yourmediashelf.com/) to hire Edwin Shin (http://yourmediashelf.com/who-we-are/edwin-shin/) on an interim basis as Fedora Project Technical Lead. Eddie will work with DuraSpace and a committee of stakeholders who recently got together to define a software project for making substantial improvements to Fedora through mid-year. At that time a permanent Fedora project lead will be engaged to continue development of "Fedora Futures".

Working with developers and the extended community, Eddie will be primarily responsible for helping the community develop the product vision, describing product functionality, and preparing an implementation plan. A number of Fedora committers will work with Eddie to achieve these goals. Additionally, he will manage and participate in Fedora committer meetings to ensure that everyone who is working on Fedora Repository platform improvements is informed and able to offer input.

If you would like the Fedora developers at your institution to participate in the project, please contact Eddie directly by email: edwin.shin@yourmediashelf.com. If you would like to find out how to otherwise support the project, please email Jonathan Markow: jjmarkow@duraspace.org.