NDSA:Wednesday, October 19, 2011
Infrastructure Call Notes
- Aaron Trehub
- Andrea Goethals
- Andrew Woods
- Dave Macaren
- Dean Farrell
- Jefferson Bailey
- John Doyal
- Joseph Pawletko
- Karen Cariani
- Martin Halibert
- Micah Altman
- Michael Sterling
- Priscilla Caplan
- Robin Trenbeath
- Trevor Owens
This was a relatively quick and focused call. We agreed on our approach for the next month.
Interpret Survey Results
Over the next two weeks one team (Micah, Karen, Trevor) are going to work on doing some intrepretation of the survey results.
Fold Survey Results into the Document
Following that, in the following two weeks the second team (Andrea, Percilla, Micah) are going to work on folding the results into the existing document and revising the document. Presumably our next call will focus on working through any issues that come up with the report.
Next Project: Open Source Software For Digital Preservation
We had a great discussion of where to go with our next project. Returning to our initial set of interests, our second interest was in doing something with open source software tools and digital preservation. In our discussion we reasserted that we do not want to put together any kind of survey, or list of existing tools. Instead, we are interested in doing something that can provide guidance for making decisions about building or implementing open source software in a digital stewardship context.
This could take the form of 25 questions to ask yourself before doing open source in digital preservation. It might involve breaking down different kinds of ways of engaging in open source projects. For example, this might include extending an existing software tool or system, building a small component, or building a major piece of software. The idea here would be to build some guidance or advice based on some of the expertise that has emerged in working with these kinds of projects in the digital preservation community. This might be framed as, If an NDSA member came to you and said I think I need to build a tool X. Nothing else does exactly what I want. What advice do you give them? Lastly, there was interest in an example where you have tools you want to make open source but your not sure on the best route.
In thinking about how to make this a actable project, we briefly discussed the idea of inviting people who have worked on very successful projects to respond to a few use case scenarios and explain how they might go about making a decision on how to go move forward. In this case, we would want to hammer out the well defined scenarios and then work up a list of people that we would be interested in talking through the scenarios with. The results of these conversations could be recorded and then used collectively to create a report and quick sheet of the questions individuals could refer to.
For reference, links came up in the discussion
Corey and Trevor presented these slides at the LC Storage meeting http://www.digitalpreservation.gov/news/events/other_meetings/storage11/docs/05_snavely_owens.pdf
Here is the draft version of the document we are working with https://docs.google.com/document/d/1TCohzINaUsfJIOV-q5lJqKAmtljg4LIU5Ejg6DSF9B8/edit?hl=en_US