Local Support Breakout Session

Hydra Connect, January 23, 2014

Introductions

John Wang, Notre Dame
how to move forward with next steps

Jimmy Tang, Trinity College

Susan Pyzynski Dance Heritage Coalition
Mellon Grant to look at Hydra
What does team look like?

Joe Pawletko NYU
Learn resource & staffing requirements

Hannah Frost Stanford
What are your issues?
Don’t have dedicated teams

Russell Schelby Ohio State
Looking for resource estimates, local collaborators

Expertise, Staffing of Local Teams

JW - 6 devs, hiring QA, Sr.Developer. Currently have app dev, arch dev; UI Dev moved to Web team. Looking forward to having a Project Manager, right now the developers are performing those roles.

JT - 5 universities, 4 developers: 3dev, 1 sys admin, plus an imager and metadata. 8 software developers, java based. No PM, JT is performing that role

SP - Hiring part time PM, considering outsourcing. What is % focus of work of teams on Hydra? JW: mostly all effort

JP - 2x Project Managers: Requirements for digitization projects. 2 FTE digitization staff + students. 5 developers, PJ is systems architect. Publication access group. Trying to move away from bespoke websites to unified presentation. Working closely with Special Collections. Challenge: JP is only Rails developer, will need to spin up folks on RoR.

HF - Gearing up, hiring, lots of activity. Starting Web Archiving, many moving pieces. Hydra Deposit Interface (Hydrus) to get off ground, had UI, 2-3 developers over 2-3 months for foundation. Building out features was ~2 debs ~75% time. After release, 1 developer: ~%30-%50. Try to use scrum-like time. HF works 1/3 to 1/2 time as Product Owner. Had lots of resources (existing Hydra experience) Total Stanford devs: 17 total (UI, Web, Cat) + 4 sys admins. Metadata is own unit under technical services.

RS - OSU has 2-3 developers, 1PM, 1Functional Mgr, 2 sys admins

Discussion

ND hired Java developers, didn’t really have RoR. Uni is thrilled with rapid spin-up of instance, but ready to give back to community (Hydramata likely). Looking for specific features to work on. Don’t think that it takes up a large team.
Is there multi-institutional projects? Avalon is two separate groups and working well.
JT is part of multi-institutional due to determining what to work on. Agile is hard to use, grants need firm deliverables. No current developers were consulted on proposals.
JW Working with Product Directors to look for hints on working with Hydromata. Not perfect but making progress. Have better conversations, is getting better. Hydramata is not grant funded, so needs extra focus to prioritize features.
Grants help focus deliverables, but they run out.
The more you can work on one task, the happier you are. Vision & clear prioritization. Context switching is expensive.
How much time is spent on different projects?
- JT 85% on Hydra, the rest helpful
- RS 5-8 projects per quarter, Executive team prioritizes quarterly
- JW also prioritizes quarterly
- JT asks for data-driven requests
- JP ~40 projects in flight, including digitization projects. brought on PM, also technical mgr. Using SMART goals.
- JW How are stakeholders handling prioritization process? JP perhaps need another layer of PM - don’t have a Service Management.
- RS Does anyone use ITIL? JP team has a bit of IT training, co-reports to Libraries, IT.
JW Ideas on how to help community grow? HF: increasing interest in Hydra, more training for developers. JT: Training has been tough, would like to set up own HydraCamp, took 3-4 months of iterations.
JT: HydraCamp: RoR intro, set up & intro to Hydra, Q&A. Would have been invaluable to spin-up
RS: Could we do a code-jam or set up a regional Hydra Camp.
JP, perspective? Research mission. Is this something that can get us up and running quickly. Community is vibrant, lots of good work has been done. Movement or collaboration? Have much legacy home-grown repository, need to move on. Don’t want to re-invent the wheel. Looking at Hydra as a middle, staging and workflow environment. RDF is nice, ‘escape hatch’. Generate IEP and push to storage.
SP: likes to see Avalon-like collaboration, out-of-the-box. Makes it approachable for smaller organizations.
RS: Avalon group has experience in creating hosted solution (Variations)
JW: coded workflows have been hard to parse for outside groups - would be beneficial to package and organize. HF: Hydramata is in a place to do that - go forward and make it happen!
JP: Community is attempting code reuse, is helping to smooth out rough edges.
JW: Other thoughts on community?
JW: Are you expanding your team?
- JP: yes, 1-2
- JT: yes, 1-2, tech companies are around the corner
- JW: have posted, learning curve is high

Next Steps

Better Code reuse, organization
Organize regional code jams
Hydra Contributors agreement is preventing adoption in at least one case
Out of the Box solutions would be helpful, hosted solutions would be interesting

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