Slides from Richard Green, Chris Arwe (Hull University, Hydra Project) David Wilcox (Fedora) Anders Conrad Sparre (Royal Library of Denmark) Gregory Markus (Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision/ EuropeanaTech) about European efforts towards building a better FLOSS Community, the benefits of contributing to Open Source projects and the successes of the Hydra Project and Fedora. Slides are from Open Repositories 2016 Conference held at Trinity College, Dublin.

1. Fedora
Building a Better Community: Collaborative FLOSS
development across national boundaries
David Wilcox, DuraSpace
@d_wilcox

2. Fedora Facts
Managed by DuraSpace (not-for-profit)
Funded by the community
Collaboratively developed by the community
Supported by 2 full-time staff members (not developers)

4. Flexible Extensible Durable Object Repository Architecture
Concept
Implementation
Community

5. Why use Fedora?
Fedora stores and preserves assets together with metadata
Fedora maintains a complete version history
Fedora protects against file corruption and copy errors
Fedora is modular, distributed, and scalable
Fedora is extensible

6. Fedora front-ends
Fedora is middleware
You can build a custom framework, or join a broader community:

7. The Fedora community
300+ public sites
1008 listserv members
24 active developers
10 committers
76 project members
23 leadership group members
8 steering group members
2 full-time staff

8. Fedora Training
Full and half-day workshops at events around the world
3 day camps for in-depth training
Hackathons, developer meetups, etc.

9. The road to Fedora 4
Community-led fundraising
Gathering use cases from the community
Volunteer code sprints
Open communication, open governance

10. Ongoing development and maintenance
New features proposed by community stakeholders
● Use cases, development, testing, and validation - all from the community
Weekly tech calls and open issue tracking for maintenance
Regional user groups keeps the community connected

11. Roadmap
Aligning with standards
● Specifying the Fedora API
● Easy import/export
More integrations
● VIVO, OSF, SHARE

12. Join the community!
Mailing lists: https://wiki.duraspace.org/display/FF/Mailing+Lists+etc
Development wiki: https://wiki.duraspace.org/display/FF
Community meetings: https://wiki.duraspace.org/display/FF/Meetings

13. FLOSS Community Success Factors
Reflections from The Royal Library Cph’s
involvement with Hydra/Fedora community
OR2016, 13 June 2016
Anders Conrad, asc@kb.dk

14. The ideal value proposition
• You contribute:
• Your code
• Your knowledge
• Facilities and work
• You receive:
• A technical platform: code, software
• Collaboration platform: knowledge, sharing
• Organisation of shared development effort
• Innovation
• Training and consulting
• Events
• ”1+1+1 > 3”

15. Investment and benefits
Shared
code
Partner
1
Partner
3
Partner
4
Partner
2
Investment:
Code
Knowledge
Benefits:
Code
Knowledge

16. Interaction dynamics
CommunityParticipant
How and when do you interact?

17. Community: enabling factors
• Well-organised codebase, easy to contribute!
• Continuous development and frequent releases
• Quality of software
• Release management and migration support
• Easy overview of products and features
• Up-to-date documentation and tutorials
• The necessary legal, fiscal and licensing setup
• Welcoming atmosphere
• Well-functioning communication channels
• Well-functioning organisation and governance
• Participant influence on strategy and roadmap

18. Participant: enabling factors
• Plan own development to add to community
• Align development plans with community
roadmap
• Use and improve existing code and ideas
• Tell community what you do and ask feedback
• Follow other people’s work
• Participate in community projects and work
• Ensure management buy-in for community
overhead in project budgets
• Contribute financially as needed
• Use training and supplier eco-system

19. Building a Better
Community:
Collaborative FLOSS development
across national boundaries
Richard Green (for Chris Awre)
Open Repositories Conference, Dublin
14 June 2016

20. To cover
• Apologies from Chris for his unavoidable absence!
• Hydra as a use case
– Fedora and Hydra
– Community underpinning
– The Hydra community – collaboration in action
• Reflections on progress to date
Building a better community | 14 June 2016 | 2

21. Fedora and Hydra
Hydra provides user interfaces and workflows
over the repository
Concept of multiple Hydra ‘heads’ over single
body of content
Fedora is the digital repository system,
managing the content in a highly structured way
The content is stored either locally or in the
Cloud
Storage
Fedora
Hydra Hydra
Hydra Hydra
Building a better community | 14 June 2016 | 3

22. Hydra
Change the way you think about Hull | 7 October 2009 | 2
• Originally a collaborative project between:
– University of Hull
– University of Virginia
– Stanford University
– Fedora Commons/DuraSpace
– MediaShelf LLC (now Data Curation Experts)
• Unfunded (in itself)
– Activity based on identification of a common need
• Working towards a reusable framework for multipurpose,
multifunction, multi-institutional repository-enabled solutions
• Timeframe: 2008-11 (but now extended indefinitely)
• Website: https://projecthydra.org
Text Building a better community | 14 June 2016 | 4

23. Fundamental Assumption #1
No single system can provide the full range of repository-
based solutions for a given institution’s needs,
…yet sustainable solutions require a
common repository infrastructure.
No single institution can resource the development of a full
range of solutions on its own,
…yet each needs the flexibility to tailor
solutions to local demands and workflows.
Fundamental Assumption #2
Building a better community | 14 June 2016 | 5

24. Creating a sustainable open source project
• Two pieces to make the whole
Building a better community | 14 June 2016 | 6
Technology Community

25. What is Hydra? Community
• Meetings, of which Hydra Connect is the big, annual get-together
• Interest / Working Group community activity
• Mailing lists, Slack, Skype/Hangouts, etc
– See: https://wiki.duraspace.org/pages/viewpage.action?pageId=43910187
Building a better community | 14 June 2016 | 7
~200 Hydranauts from 60 ins=tu=ons in the US and Europe aAended Hydra Connect 2015 in Minneapolis. Photo: Mark Bussey / Colin Smith

26. Hydra: building what we need
• Hydra has always been about building what institutions need
– If this hadn’t been the case it would have ended long ago
• Challenges
– Do more with less
– Do it fast enough
– Do it well
• The Hydra Way - Working in Community
– Mutual respect
– Shared purpose
– Continual engagement and assessment
– Tangible results
Building a better community | 14 June 2016 | 8

27. Community structure
• Community structure to coordinate activity
Building a better community | 14 June 2016 | 9

28. Hydra partnership
• From the beginning key aims have been and are:
– to enable others to join the partnership as and when they wished (Now
up to 30 Partners)
– to establish a framework for sustaining a Hydra community as much as
any technical outputs that emerge
– to foster a structure through which Partners make an active commitment
to contribute in their own way to the ongoing development of Hydra
• Establishing a legal and organisational basis for contribution
and partnership through an MoU
“If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together”
(African proverb)
Building a better community | 14 June 2016 | 10

29. Hydra: building it in ways that everyone
can contribute
• Libraries are good at developing solutions that use library
technologies and standards
– Or they have a ‘library’ take on using generic technologies
– This can lead to silo skill sets
• Hydra has endeavoured to follow standard development
practice in all its work
– Enables solutions outside of libraries to be accommodated
– Ability to bring in generic software developers/consultancies to
contribute to solutions
• Bringing library knowledge to technology solutions
Building a better community | 14 June 2016 | 11

30. Openness, with quality embedded
• All code is on github
– projecthydra and projecthydra-labs
• Committers’ process of nomination based on demonstrated
practice
• Formal Contributor Licensing Agreement
– For institutions (50+) and individuals (200+)
• Code contribution principles
– Everything must be tested and shown to be working before it gets
accepted
– See: https://wiki.duraspace.org/display/hydra/Hydra+Community+Principles
Building a better community | 14 June 2016 | 12

31. A Worldwide Presence
Building a better community | 14 June 2016 | 13
hAps://www.google.com/maps/d/viewer?mid=1eoLSoWriVJcg75DMj1ujry1kQGY Partners Adopters Solu=on bundle users

32. Reflections
• The initial Partners identified a common need, but also
recognised that we needed different ways to address this
– Hence, Hydra as a reusable framework to meet local needs building
on a common base
– We avoided trying to build another ‘solution’, but focused on a way to
more easily implement solutions
• Community demand is pushing Hydra toward a ‘product’
based on the framework – evolution of our development
– Hydra in a Box will be an encapsulation of Hydra capability, built
through community effort and based on the same framework
Building a better community | 14 June 2016 | 14

33. Thank you
r.green@hull.ac.uk
c.awre@hull.ac.uk

34. NETHERLANDS INSTITUTE FOR SOUND
AND VISION
• One of the largest audiovisual archives in
Europe
• 70 percent of the Dutch audiovisual
heritage
• More than a million hours of television,
radio, music and film (1,900,000 objects)

35. Building a Be+er Community
#FLOSS & EuropeanaTech
OR2016, Dublin
Gregory Markus
gmarkus@beeldengeluid.nl

36. PUBLIC MISSION
NISV is a cultural-historical organization of
national interest.
It collects, preserves and opens the
audiovisual heritage for as many users as
possible: media professionals, education,
science and the general public.

37. • 15 petabytes of digitized and digital
born audiovisual heritage
• Annual ingest of another 1,5 petabytes
– 8,000 hours of television
– 54,000 hours of radio
DIGITAL ARCHIVE

38. Title here
CC BY-SA
Europeana?
Europeana Essentials
CC BY-SA
OR2016
CC BY-SA
Europeana Collections homepage
Europeana| CC BY-SA

39. Title here
CC BY-SA
Title here
CC BY-SA
Europeana Essentials
CC BY-SA
OR2016
CC BY-SA
Europeana aggregation infrastructure
Europeana| CC BY-SA
Europeana?

40. By the numbers
OR2016
CC BY-SA
We aggregate very heterogeneous metadata
• More than 52M objects
• 3,500 galleries, libraries, archives and museums
• 50 languages
• From all EU countries
• Level of quality varies greatly

41. “EuropeanaTech is the community of experts,
developers, and researchers from the R&D
sector within the greater Europeana
Network.”
United Kingdom, CC BY
The Wellcome Library
Luigi
Garzi
The birth of Adonis and
the transformation of Myrrha

42. Join the community
To join EuropeanaTech you have to first join the Europeana
Network Association.
http://pro.europeana.eu/our-network/sign-up
Signs you up for our mailing list. The mailing list is great.
But can be greater (more on that later)
Allows you to participate in our Task Forces (also tbc…)
Title here
CC BY-SA
OR2016
CC BY-SA

43. Follow EuropeanaTech
• We don’t always publish but when we do we make it count.
• @EuropeanaTech
• Europeana pro (pro.europeana.eu/europeana-tech)
• EuropeanaTech Insight Newsletter
• EuropeanaTech Insight Publication
Title here
CC BY-SA
OR2016
CC BY-SA

44. Contribute to EuropeanaTech
• EuropeanaTech Insight calls
• OS tools? FLOSS (but only if well
documented)
• Who’s Using What for developers
• Task Forces
Title here
CC BY-SA
OR2016
CC BY-SA

45. Why am I here?
Title here
CC BY-SA
OR2016
CC BY-SA

46. FLOSS Development
Title here
CC BY-SA
OR2016
CC BY-SA
FLOSS Inventory
The FLOSS Inventory is a list of Free, Libre, Open Source
SoNware relevant for the digital cultural heritage
sector at large.
It was started during Europeana v 2.0 (2011) by the
Netherlands InsStute for Sound and Vision.
It currently contains 218 items.
h+p://bgweb.nl/floss/

47. FLOSS Task Force
Title here
CC BY-SA
OR2016
CC BY-SA
Cleanse
Enrich
Structure
Explore

48. FLOSS Task Force
Title here
CC BY-SA
OR2016
CC BY-SA
TaDARIAH NeMO Ontology (Digital CuraSon Unit, Athens) (Shout
out to AgiaS and her team)
-Compliant ontology which explicitly addresses the interplay of
factors of agency (actors and goals), process (acSviSes and
methods) and resources (informaSon resources, tools, concepts)
manifest in the scholarly process
-Based on
-- Oxford taxonomies of ICT methods, DHCommons, CCC-IULA-UPF
and DiRT
Challenge:
What does the tool do vs how it does it

49. FLOSS Task Force
Title here
CC BY-SA
OR2016
CC BY-SA
Lingering quesSons?
What’s the least amount of informaSon a developer needs?
Discrepancies between digital humaniSes and digital cultural
heritage.
Skill sets and capabiliSes? How big is the inventory?

50. Who’s Using What?
Title here
CC BY-SA
OR2016
CC BY-SA
1. What open source tools are you currently working with?
2. What open source tools have you used in the past to develop
larger applicaSons?
3. What are you currently developing?
4. What would you like to see developed?
h+p://bit.ly/whosusingwhat

51. Why?
Title here
CC BY-SA
DPLAFest
CC BY-SA

52. CC BY
Nationaal Archief

53. Why?
Title here
CC BY-SA
OR2016
CC BY-SA
Funding is limited
Avoid duplicaSon of work
Work towards standardizaSon, homogenizaSon and synergy
Focus on sustainability (what good is 50 prototypes if no one knows about you/
uses yours)
Manage expectaSons (who are we developing for?)
Let’s exhume that GitHub graveyard

54. EU vs USA is there a
difference?
Title here
CC BY-SA
OR2016
CC BY-SA
Funding streams
Cultural differences
Language barriers
InsStuSonal vs local vs naSonal vs Federal needs
Legacy Projects

55. So what are we gonna
do?
Title here
CC BY-SA
OR2016
CC BY-SA
Research, obviously.
InvesSgate roadblocks and barriers via workshop and surveys
Business model analysis of widely used tools
Why do people use them and how do the communiSes operate?
ConSnue “Who’s Using What?”
Research paper
Policy recommendaSons