NDSA:Tuesday, December 20, 2011
Infrastructure WG Call – December 20, 2011, 1pm-2pm
The next call will be scheduled sometime after January 23, 2012. Also, a poll will be sent out to reach agreement on a standard, repeatable day every month for having the call.
In attendance:
- John Nichols
- Trevor Owens
- Karen Cariani
- John Spencer
- Linda Tadic
- Jefferson Bailey
- Andrea Goethals
- Dean Farrell
- Dave MacCarn
- Dan Dodge
- Jane Mandelbaum
- Cal Lee
- Priscilla Caplan
- Bill Kehoe
Storage Report & CNI
- The first blog post reporting results from the storage survey has been posted. It examines access requirements in digital preservation storage systems. A second post has been penned about cloud and distributed storage and will posted soon.
- A longer report for potential publication that consolidates the co-written google document and the survey metrics is in draft form and is being worked on and will be presented to the group for comment soon
- Priscilla Caplan represented the Infrastructure WG at the CNI conference as part of an NDSA panel. The event was well attended and enthusiastically received.
Open-Source Software (OSS) Use Cases
- The use cases supplied by Andrea are unique to Harvard and do not need to guide the group’s research
- Our development of uses cases needs to take into account community support or community participation. Using OSS with no community support is one case. Developing OSS while community standards are evolving is another case.
- We need to decide on whether to focus on one use case or multiple cases
- Those we interview may have experience of knowledge applicable to multiple uses cases (such as adoption, creation, and collaboration)so it will be better to tackle two or three use cases at once
- Potentially talk with NDSA partners who have developed OSS to see what questions they think people should ask (Duraspace, CHNM) and external developers (RedHat, Mozilla, Apache)
- Also talk to institutions that use a mix of OSS and commercial software and examine when and why do they decided to do either
- Question ideas:
- Are you using OSS? Why / why not?
- Be sure to ask about whether OSS use was a good or bad experience
- How were issues with maintenance updates?
- How did past/current use impact future decision to use or not use?
- What was it used for and why did you choose this route?
- Could you walk through your decision making process?
- Is there a community around it?
- Questions should focus on the process and the aspects of the decision process that can be clarified or articulated
- We will work collectively to assemble a group of question for use in interviews. This will help define the use cases we want to explore. Questions can start open-ended and then moved towards detailed.
- Posting question internally will allow us to determine good & bad ones, then push out across NDSA for feedback, then use in interviews
- Working Group members will collectively add questions to the wiki. On the next call we will have a list of questions to polish and refine and then send to all NDSA members.
- Working Group members will also post to the wiki any ideas for interview subjects or people/groups we can have answer our questions once we have developed them
Logistics
- Members would prefer to have a set day and time each month for the call instead of having to schedule it anew each month
- Karen will send a Doodle poll to determine the best fixed time each month to have our call
Action Items
- LC team will work on blog posts and full report of the storage survey results
- Karen will send a Doodle poll to determine a fixed monthly date & time for WG calls
- All WG members will post question on OSS decision factors to the wiki
- All WG members will post potential interview subjects for the OSS interviews to the wiki