Wired Magazine’s blog network says “Google to Host Terabytes of Open-Source Science Data” while the National Science Foundation (NSF) is reviewing submissions to the DataNet solicitation “to catalyze the development of a system of science and engineering data collections that is open, extensible and evolvable.” On the surface, you might think they are working on the same project, but there is more here than meets the eye (or, rather, the ear listening to these two sound-bites).

Disclosure: OhioLINK is a named party in a submission by The Ohio State University to the NSF DataNet solicitation. We’re looking forward to a positive reception to our proposal in the first round of DataNet reviews.

As with most things Google, the real nuts and bolts of their strategy are unknown until Google chooses to unveil them. This much seems to be known: under the moniker of “Google Research” the company will make large datasets available to the world for free. According to the Wired article, “two planned datasets are all 120 terabytes of Hubble Space Telescope data and the images from the Archimedes Palimpsest, the 10th century manuscript that inspired the Google dataset storage project.” Sources at Google told Wired that the Research site will offer YouTube-style annotation features and data visualization technology purchased from Gapminder last year. Part of the plan also includes the shipping and loaning of large disk packs so the data doesn’t have to flow across the internet. The presumed home of Google Research is http://research.google.com/. At this point, that URL describes contributions by Google staff to the research community, but I’m guess that will change when the new service is brought public.

On the other hand, the NSF DataNet solicitation envisions a new type of organization that “will integrate library and archival sciences, cyberinfrastructure, computer and information sciences, and domain science expertise to: provide reliable digital preservation, access, integration, and analysis capabilities for science and/or engineering data…; anticipate and adapt to changes in technologies and in user needs and expectations; [perform R/D in] computer and information science and cyberinfrastructure…; and serve as component elements of an interoperable data preservation and access network.” More than a service, DataNet seeks a model of organization that brings varied expertise together on the issues surrounding data curation. By way of comparison, it would seem like NSF thinks of this as a people challenge while Google Research thinks of it as a technology platform challenge.

A technology platform is certainly part of the DataNet needs, but not all of it. As one of the commenters in the Wired article noted, “masses of data are of course completely useless without extensive meta-data describing provinence.” Still, given the cyberinfrastructure that Google can bring to bear on the problem of large scale data archiving and the dataset visualization technology that they now have in house, it is a big part of a potential solution. One wonders about the viability of creating a response to the DataNet solicitation that, in effect, outsources the cyberinfrastructure piece to Google and focuses on building the sustainable organization model surrounding the description and dissemination of the data.

Anybody working on that?

The past few weeks have seen announcements of large digital preservation programs. I find it interesting that the National Science Foundation is involved in both of them.

Sustainable Digital Data Preservation and Access Network Partners

Science and engineering research and education are increasingly digital and increasingly data-intensive. Digital data are not only the output of research but provide input to new hypotheses, enabling new scientific insights and driving innovation. Therein lies one of the major challenges of this scientific generation: how to develop the new methods, management structures and technologies to manage the diversity, size, and complexity of current and future data sets and data streams. This solicitation addresses that challenge by creating a set of exemplar national and global data research infrastructure organizations (dubbed DataNet Partners) that provide unique opportunities to communities of researchers to advance science and/or engineering research and learning.

The introduction in the solicitation goes on to say:

Chapter 3 (Data, Data Analysis, and Visualization) of NSF’s Cyberinfrastructure Vision for 21^st Century Discovery presents a vision in which “science and engineering digital data are routinely deposited in well-documented form, are regularly and easily consulted and analyzed by specialists and non-specialists alike, are openly accessible while suitably protected, and are reliably preserved.” The goal of this solicitation is to catalyze the development of a system of science and engineering data collections that is open, extensible and evolvable.

The full program solicitation is available (here’s a hint if the left side of the PDF version is cut off when printing — in the Acrobat print dialog, reduce the document size to 94% of the paper size). There will be up to five awards of $20 million each for five years with the possibility of continuing funding.

The part that I find interesting, from a library technologist’s perspective, is this: “Successfully providing stability for long-term preservation and agility both to embrace constant technological change and to engage evolving research challenges requires a novel combination of expertise in library and archival sciences, computer, computational, and information sciences, cyberinfrastructure, and the other domain sciences and engineering. A goal of this solicitation is to support the creation of new types of organizations that fully integrate all of these capabilities.” Undertaking such an endeavor must be a truly cross-discipline attempt — marrying up the best of library and archive practices with other forms of science and engineering to accomplish the task.

It would seem that the Fedora Commons platform is a great starting point for the technological infrastructure. It is as if the solicitation could have been written with Fedora in mind: “content heterogeneity requires that each awardee create a resource that serves a broad disciplinary and subject matter range, manages a diverse array of data types and formats, and provides the capability to support collections at the research, resource, and reference levels.” Another component of the program goals — developing models for economic and technological sustainability — is similar to OhioLINK’s attempts to aggregate the creation and support of content repositories at state-wide economies of scale.

Peter Brantley, Executive Director of the Digital Library Federation, has established a group on Nature’s Network service for those who want to collaborate or get further information (open to participation from anyone, but registration is required). There is a kernel of a group in Ohio that are considering the possibility of a joint application; if interested, please let me know. Peter also has a post on the topic on O’Reilly’s Radar.

Blue Ribbon Task Force on Sustainable Digital Preservation and Access

In its final report, the Task Force is charged with developing a comprehensive analysis of current issues, and actionable recommendations for the future to catalyze the development of sustainable resource strategies for the reliable preservation of digital information. During its tenure, the Task Force also will produce a series of articles about the challenges and opportunities of digital information preservation, for both the scholarly community and the public.¹

The only news so far appears to be the press releases linked above. Now I recognize it is a two year effort and they only got started late last month, but I half expect some public face to the work of the task force to be available somewhere, even in the early stages. If DLTJ readers see anything, please mention it in this posting’s comments.

Footnotes

1. From the OCLC press release.

Just in case this might be useful to others, I’ve created a report template based on the “Trustworthy Repositories Audit & Certification: Criteria Checklist” report. It has the section, subsection, criteria and evidence from the original report marked up in an HTML document — ready for you to add the narrative on how your repository meets the criteria. The original report included a table-style layout as an appendix; personally, I like this more free-form narrative approach.

I need to set work on this aside for a moment — if anyone gets to filling out appropriate portions based on the Fedora digital object repository, please let me know.

This year has seen the release of two personal repository services: http://PublicationsList.org/ and the U.K. Depot. These two services have an admittedly different focus, but I think it is still interesting to compare and contrast them to see what we can learn.

The Depot

The deposit interface, for those putting content directly into the centralized Depot repository, has four main stages. First, the “Type” stage, specifying whether the object is an article, a book chapter, or a conference paper:

Next, the “Upload” stage, where one can upload the file and supply a few more properties:

Then the “Details” stage, where the descriptive metadata (minus the controlled vocabulary subjects — that comes in the next screen) is input:

And finally, the “Subjects” page, with an AJAX-driven expanding-and-collapsing hierarchy of subjects:

To retrieve contents from the repository, there is a “browse” interface for looking by ‘year’ or by ‘subject’ — no other browse facets and no search interface. The Depot was just formally released this month, so I would bet that functionality like that is in the works.

PublicationsList.org

The single item entry page is a just-the-facts interface. Note that the content hosting service is only available to those who have upgraded to the “Publications List Professional” version (which costs £9.99, or approx $20/€15, per year).

The system can also accept a variety of citation manager file formats for bulk entry. (See snapshot to the right.) PublicationsList also has a built in search-and-select interface to PubMed for finding publications matching your name and automatically populating the metadata fields in your personal citation.

Then end result is a web-based bibliography with links to the publications (either hosted on PublicationsList or on other sites). The free version is hosted on PublicationsList.org (see the service founder’s page as an example) and the professional version can embed the publications list in your own page.

PublicationsList does provide discounts and additional functionality for groups (such as departments, research centers, etc.).

Observations

The one-stop, redirection service in The Depot is a good concept, too. If a researcher wanted to deposit their content in a repository and they weren’t sure if their institution had a repository to hold it, OhioLINK would be a natural place to look for a content hosting service in the state and we could redirect the author to the appropriate location on a campus. OhioLINK could also be playing the role of repository-of-last-resort for Ohio academic researchers by providing a space and services for published content, whether or not the institution in question has set up a formal repository space on the DRC.

Footnotes

1. For a really good discussion of that problem, see Davis, P.M., & Connolly, M.J.L. (2007). Institutional Repositories: Evaluating the Reasons for Non-use of Cornell University’s Installation of DSpace. D-Lib Magazine, 13(3/4). Retrieved March 14, 2007, from http://www.dlib.org/dlib/march07/davis/03davis.html.

There are just a few days left to respond to the “International Digital Preservation Systems Survey” being run by Karim Boughida and Sally Hubbard from the Getty Research Institute. From the survey description:

This survey is intended to provide an overview of digital preservation system (DPS) implementation. DPS is defined here as an assembly of computer hardware, software and policies equivalent to a TDR (trusted digital repository) “whose mission is to provide reliable, long-term access to managed digital resources to its designated community, now, and in the future”¹.

The survey was produced by the Getty Research Institute departments of Digital Resource Management and Library Information Systems, and will be distributed primarily among members of the Digital Library Federation (DLF). Results will be shared at the DLF Spring Forum, April 23-25, 2007, and with all respondents who provide contact information.

Please respond by March 30, 2007.

¹RLG. 2002. Trusted Digital Repositories: Attributes and Responsibilities. Mountain View, Calif.: RLG, Inc. http://www.rlg.org/en/pdfs/repositories.pdf.

This month has been an explosion of news for repository systems focused on digital preservation. First was the Digital Repository Audit Method Based on Risk Assessment report and worksheet from Digital Curation Centre (DCC) in the UK and DigitalPreservationEurope (DPE). The second was the Trustworthy Repositories Audit & Certification (TRAC): Criteria and Checklist from the Center for Research Libraries (CRL), OCLC/RLG, and U.S. National Archives and Records Administration (NARA). I haven’t had a chance to digest these two documents, but I’m looking forward to doing that plus the publication of the results of this survey from Getty.

This is a summary of a presentation by James L. Hilton, Vice President and CIO of University of Virginia, at the opening keynote session of Open Repositories 2007. I tried to capture the esessence of his presentation, and omissions, contradictions, and inaccuracies in this summary are likely mine and not that of the presenter.

Setting the stage

This is a moment in which institutions may be willing to invest in open source development in a systematic way (as opposed to what could currently be characterized as an ad hoc fashion) driven by these factors:

• Fear. Prior to Oracle’s hostile take-over of PeopleSoft, the conventional wisdom of universities was that they needed to buy their core enterprise applications rather than build them. In doing so, they sought the comfort of buying the security of a leading platform. Oracle’s actions diminished that comfort level. Blackboard acquisition of WebCT and lawsuit against a competitor does not help either.
• Disillusionment and ERP fatigue. What was largely thought to be an outsourced project was found to be an endless upgrade cycle. Organizations need to build entire support units to handle the upgrades for large ERP systems rather than supporting the needs of the users.
• Incredulity — we’re supposed to do what? The application of technology typically has a disruptive impact (cannot predict the end), the stakes are incredibly high (higher education and/or research could be lost in a decade), it tends to be expensive, and the most common survival strategy is to seed many expensive experiments in the hopes that one will be in the right place at the time the transition needs to happen. The massive investment anticipated for technology to support academic computing (libraries, high-performance clusters, etc) will pale in comparison to the investment in administrative computing.
• Rising tide of collaboration. This is a realization that the only way to succeed is through collaboration. To paraphrase Hilton, “In the new order it will be picking the right collaborative partners where the new competitive advantage will come from.”

Distinctions

Hilton offered these definitions and contrasts as a way to frame the rest of his discussion. First was Open or “free” software. Free as in beer, or free as in “adopt a puppy.” The software comes with the ability to do with as you want with the code, not just the ability to use the code. They he defined the term License as a contract — what ever you agree to you are bound to; you cannot use copyright law to protect you. The rules and conditions that are applied to the software do matter.

Lastly, he talked about Copyleft or “viral” licensing. There are different interpretations of “open” in open source. “Copyleft” has come to mean that code should be freely available to be used and modified, and it should never by locked up. GPL is an example. This is often called “viral” because if you include software with this license in any other work that is released, the additional software must be released under the same license. This is seen by some as valuable because it prevents open source from being encircled by proprietary code. Copyleft is contrasted with an “open/open” license — you can do whatever you want to do with a code under this license. An “open/open” license places no restrictions on what users do with code in derivative software packages.

Case Study — Michigan’s Sakai Sojourn

Hilton briefly described why UMich went down the Sakai path in 2001-2002:

• Legacy system with no positive trajectory forward. It could never be released into open source; all of the development would have to be carried on UMich’s shoulders forever.
• Saw market consolidation in CMS. This was mostly evident in the commercial sector with Blackboard and WebCT being the dominant choices. They had concerns about the cost of licenses in this environment down the road.
• Saw the potential of tapping the institution’s core competencies and starting a virtuous cycle of development, teaching and research. Or, put another way, they didn’t want core competencies in teaching and research held hostage to a commercial development cycle.
• Strategic desire to blur the distinction between the laboratory/classroom and between knowledge creation/digestion. They realized that the functions of a research support tool and a course support tool were pretty much the same under different skins, and they sought to blur that distinction even more.
• NRC report and the need for collaboration. UMich was willing to fund the project two years internally but knew after that need to find collaborative partners by the fifth year in order to be declared a success.
• A moment of time opportunity that synchronized the development process of several partners with funding provided by the Mellon Foundation.

There were also specific goals for the Sakai project. The new system had to replicate the functionality of existing course and research collaboration environments. They also wanted experience in finding partners willing to collaborate. Hilton said, “Sakai was/is at least as interest from a collaboration perspective as it is from the technology perspective.” Bringing together disparate organizations with different beliefs on how things should be done is a challenge. Additionally, they wanted to get better as an institution at discerning open source winners; it shouldn’t be like a lottery. Lastly, they wanted to implement software parts that were not built at UMich. Each partner institutions committed to implementing the same thing even if wasn’t built at that institution. This is tough to do, but they knew they needed to do it for their own good in the long run.

What happened? Not only did the original partners show up, but the community came, too. Even more interesting was that the community was formed with dues-paying members — even in a world where the software is free. It became a vibrant community, too, with a conference every six months. Sakai was released under an open-open license model, and corporate partners showed up as well (selling support services, or hosting services, or hardware for the software). The software did grow up and left its home; a separate foundation now holds the intellectual property of the code (originally partners assigned copyright to UMich). They also positioned Sakai to be a creditable threat to the commercial entities in order to force them to the standards table.

Takeaway lessons that generalize to open source development

First, the benefits of open source development.

• destiny control (but only when you really need to drive). having the control is not always a good thing. Is it worth the effort? Is the project core to the institution’s mission? (Does it directly support scholarship and teaching?)
• builds community and camaraderie (in the case of Sakai, both locally at UMich and internationally)
• unbundles software ownership and its support. inspires more competition in the implementation and support space.
• community source provides institutions an opportunity to leverage links between open source, open access and culture of the academy/wider world (a.k.a. put up or shut up)

Then, the challenges of open source development.

• Guaranteeing clean code (IP) is hard (read as “impossible”). A certain amount of faith about the code they get and there needs to be consideration for mitigating risks.
• Figuring out who is authorized to license institutionally-owned code is challenging and then you have to convince them to give it away. No one in the institution typically has been appointed or given the authority to release code. One of the things that the sakai licensing discussions highlighted was institutional differences in requirements and aesthetics.
• Patent quagmire always looming. How do you know your software is not infringing? How do you make sure you don’t inadvertently give away all institution patents? Be careful when looking at licenses from an institutional perspective versus an individual perspective.
• There is also the inevitable lawsuit risk. Or, as your counsel might say to you, “Let me get this straight, we can get sued but there’s no one we can sue.”

Then, some discoveries that they made along the way.

• An open source project not a silver bullet. The commitment to build rather than buy must align with institutional priorities and competencies; it is not right for every project/application.
• Licensing does matter; it is a contract: whatever you stick in its rules is what sticks. There are probably have too many open source license options and some sort of standardization is needed. Also keep in mind that if you release something under an open/open license, you can’t include any copyleft components.
• Communities don’t just happen, they require: specific shared purpose (when visions vary, or when they change, collaborations struggle); and governance (e.g., separate board with dedicated developers sitting between institutions). Cooperation (“I won’t hurt you if you don’t hurt me”) is not collaboration.
• Open (community) source requires real project discipline. “It is as spontaneous as a shuttle launch.” Along the way one needs to learn to balance pragmatics and ideals. One also needs to learn to trust your partners. “It really requires learning to let go.” Letting go, and having the community make the decisions, may be the quickest path to efficiency.

Reflection on open/community source for repositories

Repositories are at the center of everything at the institution. It connects with the library, with the presses/scholarly publishing operation, with classroom teaching, with the laboratory, and with the world. It is a core piece of of infrastructure for the university of the 21st century. As institutions, we need to make sustaining investments in our repositories.

Hilton sees three different approaches to “community” in the existing projects:

• dspace: community of user/developers. The come together to talk about what they want to do, write code, and support each other. Clearly there are enthusiastic users as developers.
• eprints: appears as like a vendor talking with customers wanting the community help shape the direction.
• fedora: in transition from a combination of the previous two models moving towards a Sakia-like model. it will require institutions to make commitments to it.

In the end, Hilton asked some thought-provoking questions. Is now the time for institutional investment in open/community source? Will a coherent community (or communities) emerge in ways that are sustainable? — is there a shared vision?

The text was modified to update a link from http://www.virginia.edu/vpcio/bio.html to http://www.virginia.edu/vpcio/biography.html on January 19th, 2011.

Ron Murray (no relation) from the Library of Congress sent me this announcement about a joint NASA/Google partnership, which starts:

NASA Ames Research Center and Google have signed a Space Act Agreement that formally establishes a relationship to work together on a variety of challenging technical problems ranging from large-scale data management and massively distributed computing, to human-computer interfaces.

As the first in a series of joint collaborations, Google and Ames will focus on making the most useful of NASA’s information available on the Internet. Real-time weather visualization and forecasting, high-resolution 3-D maps of the moon and Mars, real-time tracking of the International Space Station and the space shuttle will be explored in the future.

Ron went on to say:

Recall that the principal archival reference model for our community’s current archiving effort came from the space data community.

He’s referring to the Reference Model for an Open Archival Information System (OAIS), a product of the Consultative Committee for Space Data Systems, itself a cooperative of major space agencies in the world to discuss common problems in the development and operation of space data systems. Although ostensibly about archiving the digital products of space research and exploration, the committee authoring the document set out to do nothing less than “[develop] a broader consensus on what is required for an archive to provide permanent, or indefinite long-term, preservation of digital information.” ¹

So if the library community is heavily influenced by the OAIS model in how we are now fashioning our technologies, one wonders if this NASA/Google partnership can offer dividends to us as we seek to provide many of the same types of services described in the press release. OAIS is not, of course, a system specification or a network protocol that would by itself ensure interoperability. But it certainly can’t hurt if we are all talking a similar language.

Food for thought. What do you think?

Footnotes

1. “Reference Model for an Open Archival Information System (OAIS).” Consultative Committee for Space Data Systems. Report #CCSDS 650.0-B-1. p. iii.

Earlier this year, I was on a quest to hook a FEDORA content repository into the Sakai collaboration and learning environment. What looked at first to be a fairly easy integration turned out to be rather complicated and I set the project aside for another time. Today brings word from Ian Boston of a JSR-170 implementation in Sakai:

During the Summer of 2006, I did a JSR-170 Implementation of ContentHostingService as a prototype against the then Trunk 2.2 ContentHostingService. The implementation took the ContentHostingService API and re-implemented it using JSR-170 under the covers. It was done in in such a way as to allow JSR-170 clients (eg WebDAV implementations) to use the JSR-170 API directly and still obey the Sakai AuthZ implementation.

JSR-170 – Project: Resources – Sakai Confluence

JSR 170, as you might recall, is the “specification for a Java platform API for accessing content repositories in a uniform manner.” ¹ What makes this implementation most interesting, I think, is Ian’s last sentence — using a WebDAV implementation to speak directly to the JSR-170 content repository while taking into account the AuthZ settings in Sakai.

Now we need a JSR-170 implementation on top of FEDORA to complete the pairing. We’d want Sakai’s AuthZ settings to be reflected in FEDORA’s XACML rules, of course, the the mind boggles a bit about how to get this done, but hopefully we can get back to it again soon and see if we can make it work.

The text was modified to remove a link to http://issues.sakaiproject.org/confluence/x/ikE on January 13th, 2011.

The text was modified to update a link from http://www.tfd.co.uk/blogs/sakaiblog/ to http://blog.tfd.co.uk/ on January 19th, 2011.

Footnotes

1. “JSR-170,” Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Content_repository_API_for_Java?oldid=84044565 (accessed November 8, 2006)

On Friday, the Colorado Alliance of Research Libraries announced the creation of a consortium-wide digital repository project similar to that of the Ohio Digital Resource Commons.

Colorado Alliance Digital Repository Project Approved

The Board of Directors of the Colorado Alliance of Research Libraries has approved initial funding for a consortium-wide digital repository project at its October 19, 2006 meeting.

The Board of Directors of the Colorado Alliance of Research Libraries has approved initial funding for a consortium-wide digital repository project at its October 19, 2006 meeting. The project will use the Fedora open source software which was selected after a long evaluation process by the Institutional Repository Implementation Team, chaired by John Culshaw from the University of Colorado at Boulder.

The Alliance Digital Repository (ADR) project allows the participating member libraries to develop a shared technical and development infrastructure to store, preserve and disseminate a whole variety of digital objects including images, text, audio, video, learning objects, data sets or any other kind of material. The project will make use of open source tools developed by others in order to fast track functionality. As new software is developed as part of the project it will also be made available to the open source community.

via Peter Suber’s Open Access News

Welcome to the party!

The Fedora Outreach and Communications team is conducting a survey of the high-level sense of passion and commitment inherent in the Fedora community. I’ve posted some answers back to the FEDORA wiki on behalf of OhioLINK, and am also including the responses here as it fits into the “Why FEDORA?” series of blog postings. (If you are reading this through a RSS news reader, I think you’ll have to actually come to the DLTJ website and scroll down to the bottom of this post to see the table of contents of the series.) On with the responses!

How did you hear about Fedora?

I first remember hearing about FEDORA at a Coalition for Networked Information meeting in 2003. I only really remember it in passing because what was being presented was so radical that I didn’t appreciate what was being described.

I next encountered FEDORA during a conference call with the Internet2 Shibboleth core developers in mid-2004. The topic was enabling cross-repository access management — a topic that is still a challenge today (although the Shibboleth team is working on it). But that time I really started to catch on with what the FEDORA team was doing, and started paying closer attention.

Why did you chose Fedora?

When I arrived as project manager to the Ohio Digital Resource Commons (DRC) project in January 2005, OhioLINK was on the path to expand their existing Documentum installation to include a hosted institutional repository service. The Ohio DRC Steering Committee reviewed and accepted a proposal to use FEDORA as the foundation of this new hosted institutional repository service primarily because OhioLINK would be working with peers to develop the service (rather than working in isolation as likely would have happened with a Documentum-based solution).

Were there economic advantages to your project/org. in selecting Fedora?

The open source, free-to-license nature of FEDORA was definitely an advantage. It allowed us to turn grant funding that would have been used to pay for additional Documentum modules and licenses into to salary for temporary-hire programmers. In that way we felt that we had a better control over our destiny by creating the application code ourselves rather than relying on consultants.

What is Fedora’s unique role in your production system?

OhioLINK is beginning to look at the Service Oriented Architecture (SOAs) software design paradigm, and FEDORA fits right into that model as the content repository for all of our digital objects. If anything, FEDORA’s nature as a best-of-breed content repository — and nothing else — encourages us to think along the likes of sooner than we might otherwise have done.

Is there one specific Fedora attribute that enables your project/organization to accomplish your overall goals.

The fact that FEDORA is completely agnostic to what is contained in a datastream — be it audio, video, image, dataset, PDF, Dublin Core, MODS, EAD, FGDC, TEI, etc. — means that we can truly pursue a goal of managing all of our content in one place. The robustness of the content repository functions allows us to consider more interesting questions such as how this different content is ultimately presented to the end user.

Do you see yourself as an active member of the Fedora community? Why?

Yes. FEDORA represents the ability to take long-term control over the destiny of our digital objects. If, for some reason, the existing core developers at Cornell and UVa disappeared, a vibrant user community (OhioLINK included) can pick up the task of maintaining the software for the collective good. And if no one but OhioLINK is left in a “FEDORA community” our job of migrating out of it, should we desire to do so, is eased by the fact that we have the full view of the source code to help us move content and services to a new platform.

What would inspire you to become more involved?

It would take the existence of more hours in the day, I’m afraid!

What should be the mission of an ongoing Fedora organization?

A FEDORA community should first and foremost inspire communication among users of the FEDORA software. Almost all of us are working with extremely limited resources, and it weakens our collective effort if there is duplicated work underway. This communication should include not only developers but also users of the software.

The text was modified to remove a link to http://www.fedora.info/wiki/index.php/The_Fedora_Users_Interview_Survey on January 13th, 2011.

The text was modified to remove a link to http://www.fedora.info/wiki/index.php/Fedora_Outreach_User_Group on January 13th, 2011.