Thursday Threads: Let's Encrypt is coming, Businesses want you coming to the office, OR2015 Summary

This week's threads:

Let's Encrypt announces its launch schedule, so soon everyone can have web servers with encrypted transmissions;
Ploys by businesses to get you to come into the office, if you work at a place where coming into an office is optional; and
A summary of Open Repositories 2015, the conference that is all repositories, all week, including a details of a great keynote presentation by Google Scholar's Anurag Acharya on search engine optimization.

Funding for my current position at LYRASIS runs out at the end of June, so I am looking for new opportunities and challenges for my skills. Check out my resume/c.v. and please let me know of job opportunities in library technology, open source, and/or community engagement.

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Let's Encrypt Launch Schedule

Let’s Encrypt has reached a point where we’re ready to announce our launch schedule.

First certificate: Week of July 27, 2015
General availability: Week of September 14, 2015

- Let's Encrypt Launch Schedule, by Josh Aas, 16-Jun-2015

As you might recall from a earlier edition of DLTJ Thursday Threads, the Let's Encrypt initiative will allow anyone who has a domain name to get an encryption certificate at no cost. Not only that, but the effort is also building software to automatically create, update, install, and securely configure those certificates. This will make it very easy for small sites -- like libraries, archives, and museums -- to use HTTPS-encrypted connections. There has been a great deal of talk within the library patron privacy community about how to best make this happen, including a proposal by Eric Hellman for a "Digital Library Privacy Pledge" that will encourage libraries to adopt encrypted web connections across all of their services. Keep your eye out for more about "Let's Encrypt."

Five trends that are reshaping your office

But lots of companies wrestling with how to get people to show their face at work, in an era where telecommuting is increasingly popular, are trying to lure them back rather than mandate it. While organizations have long embraced the benefits of "hoteling," where employees reserve desks for themselves rather than getting a dedicated space to work every day, many are taking that concept even further, adding concierge-like staff and other perks to give workers more reasons to come onsite.
- Five trends that are reshaping your office, by Jena McGregor, Washington Post, 15-Jun-2015

I'm not sure this applies to many of our offices, but it is useful to know that these things are happening. As someone who has worked remotely for the past five years, I don't know if these kinds of perks from my employer would get me to come into an office more. It is hard to beat face-to-face interaction for its power to convey information and build community. We are using tools like Slack to reproduce that kind of interaction as best we can, and the tools are getting better at making it easier for remote teams to form cohesion and effectively get work done.

Open Repositories 2015 Summary

https://twitter.com/OpenRepository/status/609098214982213633

- Tweet from @OpenRepository, as quoted by Hardly Pottinger in his 2015 Recap

That tweet is a summary of what happened at Open Repositories 2015 last week, and Hardly's summary matches what I heard about the conference activities from a far. They keynote from Google Scholar's Anurag Acharya on pitfalls and best practices for indexing repository content was a bit hit. His slides are online as are a Selected Tweets from "Indexing Repositories" talk by Anurag Archarya, project lead on Google Scholar, 10th International Conference on Open Repositories, June 10, 2015

Selected Tweets from "Indexing Repositories" talk by Anurag Archarya, project lead on Google Scholar, 10th International Conference on Open Repositories, June 10, 2015

Selected Tweets from "Indexing Repositories" talk by Anurag Archarya, project lead on Google Scholar, 10th International Conference on Open Repositories, June 10, 2015
https://storify.com/clancynewyork/google-scholar-the-way-it-works" title="Google Scholar: the Way it Indexes (with images, tweets) | Storify">collection of tweets curated by Eileen Clancy

, and I highly recommend software developers and repository users look over these do's and don'ts for their own systems.