NDSA:Wednesday, October 19, 2011
Infrastructure Call Notes
- Aaron Trehub
- Andrea Goethals
- Andrew Woods
- Dave MacCarn
- 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) is going to work on doing some interpretation of the survey results.
Fold Survey Results into the Document
Following that, in the following two weeks the second team (Andrea, Priscilla, Micah) is 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, extending, implementing, or releasing 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, releasing an existing internal tool to the public, 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 an NDSA member coming to you and saying: "I think I need to build tool X because nothing else does exactly what I want." What advice do you give them? Lastly, there was interest in defining a scenario where you have tools you want to make open source but are not sure how to move forward. Other ideas included having this guidance take the form of a decision tree or a requirements analysis document.
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 proceed. In this case, we would want to hammer out the well defined scenarios and then work up a list of people with which to discuss them. The results of these conversations could be recorded and then used collectively to create both a report and a quick reference sheet of questions for individuals to consult before undertaking open source digital preservation projects.
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