Discussion on Strategy 3: Growing a Vendor Ecosystem

Strategy 3: Grow the Vendor Ecosystem & Define the Vendor Community Structure

How do we come up with the structure that supports good vendors who contribute to Hydra community?

International presence is important.
There is a catch 22. If there is a demand and source of income, there are vendors who would respond in US and UK, possibly elsewhere. There are places that have Ruby specialists, but not Hydra specialist.
One goal is to grow the environment – we could focus on regions where there may be hydra growth, but no support/vendor support.
Should we put out a call to partners?
Should we do more recruitment of vendors like we did for partners? What is our short list and what is our approach?

We should make a list of types of vendors and prioritize that list.
Is there anyone doing rails/ruby work in this community? We could focus on vendors who do this work.
You could slice business along the lines of 1) custom software developer 2) hosting and 3) training
There are vendors that support libraries we can focus on.
What about Dspace support providers?
Museum spaces are a potential community for growth and possible need for vendor help
Do we want more vendors or do we want DCE to expand?
- This has to do partly with goals internal to DCE
- It lowers our risk with more vendors

Seems like training is the most needed thing. We can use that a way to try out people in the community.
Three spaces: training, bootstrapping implementations, tapping new markets (museums, new type of content, etc).
Is there going to be a way for the community to certify a vendor? Do you need a certification or is word of mouth and community a better approach. Best to list groups/people, if there are a lot of bad references, bunt them off the list. There is too much overhead in certification.

Broadcasters are a new market. Cultural institutions in general - what kind of vendor support would be needed for that?
Sounds like what we need is someone who can do implementations in Europe, if enough people adopt Hydra - then market grows.
There are Inter-governmental agencies that are interested in fedora -
Two adopters/partners are in Denmark. If we want to be proactive in this Europe, one focus should be Finland. Finland has a long history of sending teenagers to US for the year as well there is OR14 Helsinki – 2014

It should be noted that there is National Library adoption of Hydra, for example the Royal Library - Denmark
Dig Repo of Ireland ?
A library in Slovenia ?

Hydra community is present in the library world - institutions have matured. For example a strong presence existed at Code4lib, we need to be involved and presenting Hydra projects in target communities.
We should be expanding out through Rails communities. Sectors can be brought together by technologies. We should use their networks to let people know about our community.
We should do some outreach about inclusive community, we have a community that is healthy and productive. One way to do outreach is to write articles about the Hydra community, Bess has two in the works.
We need to get the message to sys admins/operations folks. Idea to send dev ops teams for a day workshop. Building on conversation about communication barriers between cooperative between sys admins and developers is important in our training.

We need a training module here on "Being a Hydra sys admin" and "how do I, as a developer, foster a better relationship with my sys admin"?

Ruby soloist community, one person consulting shops. Might be worth expanding efforts in that community.

Project and vendor alignment – however the Steering group has talked about it. We might be trying to solve a problem that we don't understand yet. Maybe look at some vendor resources to expand the community.