NDSA:Open Source Software

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Scoping the Project

Key Issues to Consider in Evaluation of Open Source Platforms for Digital Stewardship

After talking about the description below over the list serve it seems like it might be more valuable to step back and simply say that the group is exploring key issues and points of consideration in use and practices for using or developing open source software for key components in digital preservation software decisions. _______________________________ The NDSA infrastructure working group is engaged in a year-long project to identify key issues for consideration in making build, buy or adopt decisions on open source software platforms used to provide and maintain long-term access to digital content. This project is scoped to focus specifically on issues in the following three areas:

  1. Significant enterprise software system decisions: We are focused on relatively large server-side or desktop systems - not little widgets or snippets of code.
  2. Systems directly involved in long term preservation and access: We are focused on software systems that play a significant role in either the workflow which supports preservation and access, or the infrastructure that enables preservation and access. This is not a consideration of all open source systems. (For example, while there are enterprise deployment considerations around things like Firefox and OpenOffice, they are out of scope on this criteria.)
  3. Focus on points of comparison and consideration between open source and other solutions: We are focused on documenting the key decision points one would make in evaluating whether to build, buy or adopt open source solutions. This is not an attempt to ... This is not an attempt to put together a broad decision tree about any and all enterprise level systems for preservation and access.

Goal: To produce some form of guidance and/or basic decision support tool (checklist, rating, etc.) to help guide decision-making in this area.

Developing Questions For Ourselves to Respond To

What kind's of questions do we want NDSA members to respond to that will help us in identifying key questions to ask when making decisions about each of the use cases? Please post question ideas on the NDSA:Open Source Member Questions page.

Suggestions for who would be interesting to talk to

Please post ideas for NDSA:Who we Might Want to Invite to Comment on each of these cases. Ideally to invite them to comment on the key decision points. It would be great if they can comment on the doc.

References

  1. We need to choose software solutions, potentially open source, for a project.
  2. We learn of an opportunity to participate in an existing project to collaboratively develop an open source software product.
  3. We see an opportunity to initiate the development of a collaborative open source software product.
  4. We have locally-developed software that could be made open source.
  • Decision Support Tools. Open Source Software in Libraries. [1]
    • Includes a survey tool, cost factors, etc. Some (all?) of this information is the same as on the code4lib wiki.
  • Decision Support Tools. Code4Lib wiki. http://wiki.code4lib.org/index.php/Decision_Support_Tools
    • Includes advantages, disadvantages and costs of using OSS, and links to other relevant documents

Working Title

25 Questions to ask when considering open source software for digital stewardship and preservation

Goal

Refine a set of questions or a decision tree that we provided to help guide decisions around open source software’s use in digital preservation and digital stewardship.

Process

We work off of Andrea’s set of questions, refine them and tweak them if we like. Then we set up a series of calls with people we identify as having some particular insight and or expertise. We send them the revised document before hand, and then give them a chance to comment on the initial set of questions. They can offer stories of times when a given issue was particularly important, make suggestions for how they would prioritize these issues, remark on what they think should also be included or if there are some things that don’t need to be included. We take significant notes on each of the calls and post those up on the wiki as we go. So, we would have monthly calls with one expert a month for, say five or six months. After each call we would tweak our document in light of the previous calls and organize our notes to keep track of things we will want to talk about in a final report that accompanies the final revised set of questions. At the end of this process we would have a set of organized questions that partners could use as a tool, we would then also produce a report that explained why these were particularly important questions based on our own experience and including commentary from those involved in the process.

Schedule

Here is a quick schedule I would suggest for working on this:

  1. January we identify, contact, and schedule our conference call speaker/commenters
  2. Feb through June we do monthly calls with speakers, taking notes and iteratively revising our set of questions.
  3. July we share the questions and something reflecting on their development at the NDIIPP/NDSA partners meeting.
  4. Aug-September, we draft the final report doc
  5. October-December we would disseminate the resulting products and start planning our next project.
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