September 2012 Agenda and notes

Contents: 

NB  Notes from the meeting are linked from the headings in the schedule...

Agenda Items

Following a successful experiment at Virginia in June, this meeting will be in part multi-tracked to allow managers, developers and ad hoc groups the opportunity to deal with their own particular topics. Agenda items will be broken up into plenary items and tracked items much nearer the meeting itself. Please add agenda items below without regard to track.

Main meeting agenda items

Standing items

• Date and place of next meeting(s)
• Review of wiki hardware deployment pages
• Review of wiki software deployment pages
• Review of website
  • particularly important in view of recent forced rebuild!
• Release manager rotation, Instructions for Release Managers (release steps, email templates, etc.)
  • Mike Giarlo is willing to be RM for pretty much anything except HH for the next quarter

Potential Topics

• developing a common, pubic documentation store and knowledge base for content modelling approaches
  • see Re: hydra-tech New to Hydra – example practices for still images? thread on Hydra-Tech from
  • https://wiki.duraspace.org/display/hydra/Community+Content+Modelling
  • Following up on earlier discussions of same
• Documentation
  • How & Who to maintain documentation?
  • Where/who to seek help when a newbie finds errors and is willing to fix
• RDF
  • using RDFDatastream to organize your repository
  • using RELS-INT, ex. Ben Armintor's organization of image derivatives
  • replicating relationships from other sources
    • EAD: linking Hydra objects with collection-level objects from an archival collection
    • Subjects: linking up to LoC subject headings (Penn State is doing this?)
• Modularization and integration points
  • Modularization
    • Providing better separability between Hydra framework components
      • Blacklight and Atrium as context for discussing how to handle dependencies between engines
    • Defining internal interfaces
    • Documenting internal interfaces
  • Integration points
    • Defining Hydra-specific API (as opposed to Fedora API and Rails-standard API)
• Hydra's "stability window"
  • The difficulty of upgrading Hydra deployments increases rapidly with time deployed-- how fast is too fast?
  • Can we define a window within which upgrading should have a low (perhaps a defined) cost?
  • Important for institutions without full-time technical support for Hydra deployments.
• Hydra auth vs. Fedora auth
  • Where is Hydra duplicating Fedora auth functionality?
  • What will be required to reduce duplication (what is missing in Fedora/FESL)?
• Hydra authentication/authorization -- interface and backend to support content and collection sharing. See Avalon authorization use cases.
• Forthcoming Hydra Webinars
  • Contingency planning for screencasts not working with Adobe Connect
• Code Swap Meet
  • IDEA1: take the best code components from various hydra-heads and exchange them with other hydra-heads with a similar need
    • Possible Topic: Best practices for multi-valued fields (e.g. modeling, UI, ajax/controller code).
  • IDEA2: have developers converge on one or two hydra-heads of great common interest; polish & release these as widely adopted open source
    • Candidate 1: Atrium
    • Candidate 2: DIL
    • Candidate 3: Scholarsphere
    • Candidate 4: ?
• ActiveFedora Topics
  • Evaluate possibility of lazy-loading all datastreams in AF
• JIRA cleanup
  • Suggested by Chris Beer on the committer's call... we should go through old tickets and decide which ones to keep then delete the rest
• Datastore isolation
  • Strategies for removing all knowledge of how information is stored (e.g. Fedora, XML nodes, datastreams) from the standard Rails stack...similar to the way ActiveRecord (mostly) removes all SQL queries from your entire codebase. Even with ActiveFedora, OM, etc., there seems to be still be a lot of configuration and special code required for new (and veteran) developers to deal with.  How close can we get to just writing a standard Rails app?
  • Lighter weight alternatives to ActiveFedora and OM for simple use cases (app that just need to edit a label in a datastream or add tags).
• Critical bugs
  • Discover v read does not work as advertised - seems like something that needs fixing urgently.  (Is it a regression bug?  I remember discussing this in Stanford months ago...  RG)
• HH5
  • What do we do with FileAccess module
  • When will we have a RC?
  • When do we expect a gem?
  • Tutorial app needs updating
  • New Release Manager?
  • Cucumber tests, do we need them?
• HYDRA-836: Chris suggested we look at this, from the latest Jira sprint:
  • https://jira.duraspace.org/browse/HYDRA-836

Steering committee agenda items

• Public Website Hosting Issues
• Progress on MOU appendix
• Rock Hall MOU/CLA Concerns
• Updates from Mediashelf
• Steering Group retreat (yes/no?  what do we want from it?  facilitator?  when?  where?)
  • where should Hydra be by OR13?
  • On Steering Group Hub
    • Hydra conversations
    • Community Use Cases
    • Strategic Planning
• Progress on Hydra trade mark
• Progress on CLAs

Partner update proposals

• Notre Dame: Atrium, EAD mgmt, and workflow
• Rock and Roll Hall of Fame: Video ingest and cataloging
• Hull: (largely Blacklight) work on new, Hydra-compatible OPAC interface (5 mins)
• Indiana/Northwestern: Avalon Media System update (formerly Variations on Video)
• MediaShelf: HydraCamps, Jenkins AWS work, Fedora
• Blacklight Browse Nearby gem
• Stanford: Hydrus

Schedule (including session notes)

Monday, Sept. 10

8 - 9 AM:  Steering Group Meets

Beer Topics: Webinar Prep, What is Hydra?, Fedora Independence

6:30 PM (Group Dinner, at The Vine) Pictures from dinner

Tuesday, Sept., 11

8 - 9 AM:  Steering Group Meets

Wednesday, Sept. 12

8-9 AM: Steering Group Meets

Attendees