NDSA:Tuesday, May 17, 2011

Notes for NDSA Infrastructure Working Group Call: Tuesday, May 17th, 3:00pm

• Andrew Woods
• Cory Snavely
• Dave MacCarn
• Dean Farrell
• Gene Hurr
• John Sarapo subbing for John Spencer
• John Unsworth
• Karen Cariani
• Martin Halbert
• Trevor Owens

Next Steps

1. Write up and share draft synthesis papers on responses: Karen on questions 1-4, Gene and Trevor on questions 5-9, Corey and Martin on questions 10-13.
2. Schedule presentations from additional cloud providers: Andrew to check in with contacts at Amazon and Azure and report back to the list in short order. Trevor will talk to Leslie as back up for Azure. Check in with Micah on his efforts to arrange something with representatives from Amazon and Google.
3. June call will focus on reviewing draft documents and planning workshops for face-to-face meeting in July.

Discussion of Large Scale Storage Implementation Questions

The call started with a review of the responses received thus far. In general, the six sets of responses represent an interesting and diverse set of member institutions. While the group intends to continue collecting there was consensus that there is enough material here to begin to synthesize these responses.

After briefly discussing possible approaches to developing this synthesis the group agreed the best way forward was to break the responses up by question and have different working group participants draft up documents that piece together similarities and differences across the responses. The group identified three distinct chunks of questions and five individuals on the call volunteered to help synthesize across each of those chunks.

Synthesizing the across the responses

In preparation for the next call the following working group members will draft and share the following brief documents for discussion over the mailing list. The goal of these documents is to capture both commonalities and differences that emerge in the responses. Because the responses come from a rather diverse set of institutions it is likely that there will be more differences than commonalities. Documenting these differences is of particular importance. Beyond simply documenting differences the volunteers should feel free to include commentary on those differences. Part of the value of this particular group engaging in this work is that we represent significant expertise in this field and commentary of the volunteers is itself quite valuable.

1. Karen will put together a brief document describing the information gleaned from questions 1-4. This information is primarily descriptive of the institutions, their goals, and their mandates.
2. Gene and Trevor will draft a document synthesize questions 5-9. These are the questions that generally describe the storage systems responders’ use.
3. Corey and Martin will draft a document synthesizing responses to questions 10-13. These questions delve deeper into probe deeper into the kinds of systems responders are using.

Scheduling Additional Cloud Storage Provider Presentations

The group would still like to host presentations from several of the major cloud providers. To work toward this end, Andrew volunteered to check in with contacts with Amazon and Azure and report back to the list in short order. Trevor will also follow up with Leslie about her contact with Azure. Trevor will check in with Micah on his efforts to arrange something with representatives from Amazon and Google.

It would be ideal for the group to begin scheduling these presentations before the working group call next month.

Discussion of Workshops for the Summer Face-to-face meeting

The group briefly discussed the workshop they would like to host at the summer meeting. The group agreed that the meeting could provide both a great deadline for moving work along on the large scale/cloud storage project as well as an opportunity to get additional input and comment on this work.

For the summer meeting we will plan on having a draft document that explores and documents the viewpoints, values, and approaches, articulated in the responses to the large-scale storage implementation questions.

In the next call we will need to define exactly what the structure of this workshop will be. For example, if we plan to break workshop participants into smaller focus groups that dig into specific parts of the document what should be the basis by which we break into groups (i.e. based on kinds of institution, based on specific themes or issues, based on particular claims we may tentatively want to make)

Along with this workshop the group briefly discussed the idea of hosting a workshop focused on ideas, models, and approaches to sustainability for open source software and tools for digital stewardship. It was suggested that the summer meeting could use a workshop of this kind to kick off a next phase of working group work that focuses on open source software.