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
• What vendor support do we really need as a community?  
• 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.  
• Other communities:
• Museum IT - wants a national solution - there would be a market for adopting.  
• There has to be someone who is doing hosting for small shops.  
• 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 ?
• Outreach strategies:
• 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.  
• What we didn't talk about:
• 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.  

Different Ways of Slicing & Dicing the Potential Vendor Community

By Vertical Domains

• public broadcasting
• museums
• other cultural institutions
• government
• Inter-governmental organizations
• etc. 

By Geographic Regions

• N. America
• Europe
• Austaliasia
• Africa (EIFL?)

By Services

• training (but Hydra training working group might be covering this)
• hosting
• implementation services
• app support

By Technical Communities

• people offering RoR apps / services
• Lyrasis?
• DSpace consultancies (CILEA, etc.)
• Rails communities
• Rails Conf.
• Ruby Soloists