Invitation letter January 2014

Mark your calendars and join the growing Hydra community for the Worldwide Hydra Connect Meeting to be hosted by University of California, San Diego,January 21-24, 2014! This is a new event for the Hydra community and is focused on connecting you to the benefits of Hydra solutions, its community, and the way we work. For folks who haven’t attended a Hydra meeting before, this is an opportunity to connect with other Hydra users, find out what Hydra is all about, and get involved; for established Hydranauts it is an opportunity to share experience with friends old and new, and to see what is going on across the Hydrasphere. As a Hydra Partner or user, if you can only make it to one Hydra meeting this academic year, this is the one to attend.

The agenda is shaping up and it will provide a chance to engage people who want to know more about Hydra, more about what their peers are producing, deepen engagement with active projects or to pursue to new ideas. This is an opportunity for all Hydra Project participants, old, new and fledgling, to gather in one place at one time, with an emphasis on sync’ing efforts, technical development, plans, and community links.

Tuesday 21st January will focus on workshops, tutorials and “un-conference” slot planning. Current suggestions include:

RailsBridge
Dive into Hydra
Hydra for Managers
Open Track Planning

We welcome suggestions for other sessions, and volunteers lead to them.

Wednesday 22nd and Thursday 23rd January will be a mix of plenary sessions, open forums and working groups.

Wednesday will start with “Welcome & What’s the Big Deal?” – a fairly brief summation of Hydra’s core purpose, the state of the Hydrasphere today, and an indication of the exciting developments already taking place or planned over the coming months.

Common to both days, we plan plenary sessions briefly demonstrating some of the established production Hydra heads, to show the range of Hydra’s capabilities, and some of the new heads still in development addressing further community needs. Some of these new, cutting-edge heads are intended to become “solution packs”. There will be extended open sessions for participants to meet and talk with managers and developers from many of the Hydra Partners to follow up on the demonstrations, see further Hydra heads in a less formal setting, ask questions, plan possible collaborations, network and generally to get involved! In addition there will be working groups addressing a range of community and software issues (some likely formed following discussions in the plenary sessions).

• All Hydra Partners will be asked to prepare a poster, live demo or “lightning talk” that highlights the features, functions and uses of their Hydra-based solutions. This will provide all attendees with a first-of-its-kind global view of all Hydra development.

On the Wednesday evening we plan a social event.

Friday 24th January will be a chance for focussed workgroups to come together, for instance to plan future developments. Workgroups have already been proposed to discuss:

Hydra and Fedora 4
Hydra and RDF
A “sharable IR” solution pack
Media solutions: Avalon, Hydra DAMs, and more

…and we welcome advance suggestions for others. Undoubtedly, one or two groups will come together based on conversations in the preceding days.

You want to come? (Of course you do!) A formal booking procedure will be announced shortly. For the moment, mark the dates in your diary and, importantly, fill in your details on the wiki page at Hydra Connect 2014 Attendee/Needs Estimation. If you don’t have edit access to our wiki, email the details to hydra-steering@googlegroups.com and we’ll fill it in for you. This page is to help us gauge likely attendance and the demand for block-booked hotel rooms. We’ll then let you know about the meeting booking procedure (probably using EventBrite) as soon as it is available.

Please note, to help cover the costs of running the event, we will be requesting $40 per attendee.

Stay tuned for more details and of course – as is the Hydra Way – please make detailed suggestions……the agenda is what the community makes it!

See you in San Diego!