Coordinating Meeting January 29 2021 11:30 am AST

• Chair: Mirko Hanke
• Notes: Brandon Weigel

Per: Schedule

• Attending:
  • Melissa Anez
  • Danny Lamb
  • Amy Blau
  • David Wilcox
  • Don Richards
  • Drew Heles
  • Gabriela M
  • Ian Song
  • Mike Kemezis
  • Mirko Hanke
  • Brandon Weigel
  • Bethany Seager
  • David Kwasny

Agenda

Welcome to new members: Drew Heles

Old Business

• Previous meeting notes

New Business

Governance/Committers communication? Should we have a regular meeting like Fedora does?

Fedora has governance and committers meets quarterly to communicate and give groups understanding of what one another is doing; suggesting Islandora do the same.

Support for idea: more cross-channels are good. Also nice for Danny not to be the sole technical representative for the entire project.

In Fedora, had a Committer as a representative on the governance group, providing more technical voices.

Formal proposal: Establish a quarterly Committers/Coordinating Committee meeting, as a regular thing for Islandora, using Fedora's approach as a basis.

Vote: Proposal accepted.

Next steps: Melissa to send a form for absent members to vote. If passes, will schedule a first meeting.

Interest Group Updates

• IR interest group (Don)
  • Bryan taking some time away from the IR group to focus on a project
  • Discussed Code4Lib call - IR topics to vote for
  • Discussion of Fedora 6 release, performance testing
  • Born Digital bootstrap theme and IIIF integration
  • Suggestion: Integrating some Thesis and Dissertation examples in the Islandora 8 Sandbox
• Documentation Interest Group (Mirko)
  • No recent meetings
  • Need an additional co-convenor: David volunteers

Islandora 8 (Danny)

• Recent work getting ISLE working with Fedora 6 - mostly paid off. A version is available now which can be downloaded and used. Some minor changes were needed (State Token). All works. Looks like an Islandora on Fedora 5, except uses OCFL filesystem.
• Small issue: weirdness with spaces in filenames. Difficult to reproduce.
• Praise for Fedora people.
• Import/export between Fedora 5/6 in Islandora 8 context: A migration path exists, tied in with ISLE migration path. If you can provide public Drupal filesystem and database dump, and a Fedora export, can migrate into Fedora 6 with a make command and a reindex.
• Release with Fedora 6 and Drupal 9 coming down the pipe, sometime in March
  • Question: Will this be the next release? For those operating on HEAD, is this something to sneak in, or "As Of This Release.."
  • Answer: Yes. There is workflow stuff that needs to be sorted out, and lots of changes coming through. As part of release, want people to test the upgrade, and their feedback will be incorporated into the documentation.
  • Suggestion: Can "put stakes in the ground" with official releases: "This release is Fedora 6", etc.
  • Answer: If everyone is on ISLE, such versioning becomes easier to do. But this total buy-in is unlikely.

Branding

Idea: Semantic versioning... Codenames for releases instead of numbers? We can name each release for a different crustacean.

• CTDA experience: naming is difficult and long process.
• Fedora also trying to get away from numbering releases.
• Numbered versions seem scarier - 8 to 9 looks like a Major Release or Migration even if it's not.
• Who is responsible? Coordinating Committee is, but should consult TAG and Board.
• Question: What are the milestones between different versions (I7, I8, I9)?
  • Answer: Numbers based on Drupal versions.
• Question: How does this impact branch names, or is it just a branding thing?
  • Answer: No affect on the minutia of the tagging process; will all be semantically versioned for the next release. Each piece/module has its own numbered release, but the official Islandora Releases will be named.
• Comment: Because Islandora as a stack is modular, the more we simplify the branding, the more is implied re Drupal version, Fedora version, etc. But not everyone is using every part of the stack together. In simplifying, we should leave room for the flexibility - by referring to "Islandora Ammonite", it should be understood that it implies that you can use different versions while still being part of the community.
  • Response: If you take the stack apart or do something different, you know you are taking responsibility for your own complexity.
• Comment: A Linux distro is a recommended package. Just a matter of making it clear in the branding. But it's important to make the architectural difference between Islandora 7 and Islandora 8 very clear.
  • Response: When support for Drupal 7 ends, so does support for Islandora 7. Maybe it's good to time all of this with the sunset of Islandora 7.
  • Response: No reason not to continue referring to older versions of Islandora as 6 and 7. Move to semantic versioning for the next release of Islandora 8 - the longer we continue saying Islandora 8, the harder it will be to change.

Proposal: Islandora will move from branding with major version numbers (Islandora 7, Islandora 8, etc), and refer to the platform only as Islandora, with semantic versioning used to distinguish the technical milestones, and (potentially) code names used for individual releases.

Decision: No vote for now; will discuss with the TAG and Board first, then hold a vote.

Action: Melissa to take the proposal to TAG and Board. ICC will discuss again by March.

Islandora Events

Open meeting report

• Happened Jan 28, record turnout (28 attendees) with new people joining, 2.5 hours of solid content.
• Model working very well.
• Born Digital did a demo of a very nice theme they worked on for Lyrasis, which will be contributed back.
• Nigel Banks demonstrated Advanced Search, which will also be contributed.
• Will do another in February; seems to be filling a niche in the community.
• Hoping for more demos at future meetings.

Demos were recorded and will be shared.

Round Table

• Melissa: AGM soon
• Danny: UTSC extracted a complex piece of the stack and brought it into Drupal with a nice UI, in a nice way we might want to implement more broadly. https://github.com/digitalutsc/triplestore_indexer
• Amy: Through ICG, learned of https://www.scomcat.net/ - Islandora should be on this list. Do we want to do this?
  • There is a form to request an addition. Better to have a user submit than the Foundation?
  • Amy will ask someone from ICG to do it.
• Bethany: Wondering about batch ingest options in Islandora 8.
  • Danny: Also interested in that; several options have been built. Workbench is the best tool; can burn some things we don't need to maintain anymore, try to drive people from Migrate to Workbench, consolidate efforts.
• David W: Close to a feature complete Fedora 6 beta release in a few weeks, full release in a few months.

Next meeting February 12

• Batch Ingest discussion to be added to next meeting agenda.
• Chair: Brandon Weigel
• Notes: Gabriela Mircea