NDSA:Innovation Working Group

Statement of Purpose

By encouraging and sharing innovative methods of digital preservation practices and technologies, we plan to distribute, document, and share emerging concepts, while conducting and guiding research and development with engaged partners to find solutions where none exist.

Current Proposed Action Teams

NDSA:Defining goals and principles

Develop a clear statement on the goals and purposes of data stewardship.

One of the immediate challenges to the NDSA is that there is no clear statement of the goals and principles of Data Stewardship. Without such a statement, the formulation of new approaches to meet these goals while adhering to appropriate principles is difficult. Anything that is too different from current approaches may be met with skepticism and challenged as diverging from tradition. More abstract statements of goals and principles that are independent of current practice are necessary in order to allow innovation to be evaluated in a fair and meaningful way.

An example of such a question is this: Does Data Stewardship have a requirement to store the original sequence of bits (format) that defines each digital object preserved, and the sequence of formats into which this original sequence has been transformed? Is it acceptable if the original or some of the intermediate forms are lost or allowed to deteriorate? Is the preservation of bits sufficient, or is the preservation of functionality in interpreting those bits required? What does preservation of functionality mean?

Micah and others suggested that an action group could develop a provocative statement on goals and purposes as a first step and then use that statement to move others to comment and discuss. George Oats and Micah Beck expressed interest in being involved with an action committee for this project.

NDSA:Digital Preservation X-Challenges

There was a lot of interest in challenging the preservation community to innovate and to coordinate and organize such efforts. It would seem that such efforts might be most productive if our working group came up with specific "X-Prize" type challenges that the community could address. If the working group formulated ideas that were then endorsed by the NDSA as a whole, some of them might be appealing enough to attract prizes or recognition for the winners.

An example might be to organize a huge database (an Exabyte? 10 Exabytes) and keep it functional for a minimal period of time (a month? a year?). Maybe that's an uninteresting example, but it gives the idea of a project that would have to involve the community, would attract attention, and would face considerable technical challenges.

John expressed excitement about this idea. This project would require a system or procedure where group members collaborated to identify a range of digital preservation challenges and then select particular challenges for which prizes could then be awarded. The group briefly discussed looking to industry or other institutions as potential prize sponsors. The specifics of this project would need to be defined by the action group.

See NDSA:Future projects for areas for the group to explore at a latter date.

Current Members

A list of current members is posted here: NDSA:Innovation Working Group Members.

Meeting Schedule and Minutes

One meeting was held in 2010 to kick-off the Innovation Group and to develop the charter:

November 5, 2010 from 11:00 AM – 12:00 PM ET - NDSA:Meeting Minutes 12-7-10

Practices

• Listserv: for ongoing communication
• Web site: for public dissemination of group’s work
• Monthly conference call: for coordinating ongoing activities
• Wiki: our common work space

Participation

Participation in the Outreach Working Group is restricted to NDSA member organizations. Contact co-chairs Micah Beck or Trevor Owens to join the working group.

Participants in the working group will participate in working group phone calls, undertake tasks to help the working group accomplish goals, and be active in helping accomplish the goals of the working group.

Action Teams may be created around specific tasks. These Action Teams may be self organized by members of the working group and may include non-NDSA members as the work requires. Non-NDSA members will not be participants in the Working Group but may contribute to the activities of any Action Team. Action Teams will update the Working Group about their accomplishments and progress.