 Hi, everyone, I'm David Wilcox, the program leader for Fedora at Lyrasys, and I'm joined here today by Aaron Griffith, who is the program coordinator for Fedora at Lyrasys. And today we just wanted to provide an update on what's been going on with Fedora 6.0 and talk about how we are working to bring the community forward to this new version of the software. So the roadmap for Fedora in 2021 is pretty simple. Really, we're just focused on releasing version six, which has been in the works for about two years. It's a pretty major update to the back end of the software. And at the same time, we're really committed to releasing robust migration tooling and documentation in order to support the community and being able to move forward to this latest version of the software. And that is a big part of the sort of third point here. Once the software and the tooling has been released, really a lot of our focus is going to be on making sure that the community can use the software migrate to the software and come forward to version six of Fedora. So Fedora 6.0 has several benefits. We're just going to cover things at kind of a high level here. The main ones are providing enhanced support for digital preservation, which is something that our community has asked for for some time, as well as improved performance and scale, particularly relative to version four and five, as well as making migrations easier and also making sure that we can have fewer migrations into the future. And these are all things that we have heard from our community that they've wanted. And so a lot of what we've been doing with version six is trying to respond to those needs. So one of the major new features of version six is the adoption of the Oxford common file layout. And this is really just a simple open standard for how to organize the content in your repository using a fairly simple file and folder structure that supports digital best practices. And this is an emerging standard that goes beyond the Fedora community, but one that we think really satisfies a lot of the needs of our users. And that is seeing fairly broad adoption in other digital preservation contexts. So in terms of the current status, we're making really good progress in December, we released an alpha build of version six, and in February we released a beta and this beta is feature complete. And so we anticipate over the next few months to be able to get to a full production release, certainly within the first half of this year, once we've done sufficient testing and validation and acceptance in the community. And so this work is also supported by a grant project that we've been working on since September. This is funded by the Institute of Museum and Library Services. And the focus of the grant is helping the community move from version three of Fedora to version six. This is a $250,000 grant that is taking place over 18 months. And the challenge that this grant is trying to address is that most Fedora installations are still running unsupported versions of the software so version three or even earlier than that which has not been supported for some years. And while software does tend to come and go. What's really important here is the content so there's lots of cultural heritage and scientific research information that's in these repositories. The content is at risk the longer it sits in this aging infrastructure, lots of things can go wrong. Once these systems are no longer supported. And if they fail, all of that content is at risk. But at the same time, migrations take a lot of time and effort and so there's been a major roadblock in the community for a few years now, and being unable to move forward to a more modern supported version of Fedora. Because the migrations have taken so much time and effort. And so the goal largely of this grant is to bring the community forward to, as I said a modern supported version of Fedora and this coincides really well with our overall goal for the program so it's really convenient that this grant came in when it did. So we're able to work on the grant while still supporting the core mission that we have for Fedora this year. The process for the grant is fairly simple. We are working with pilot partners to upgrade and migrate their repositories and focused on developing testing and refining migration tools. And we're going to produce some documentation and best practices and package everything up into kind of a toolkit that we can then share with the community. And then get them to test it and give us feedback on it before we eventually host a dedicated migration training event at the end of the the grant period. We're currently in the first phase of the grant which is the pilot phase began in September and runs roughly through to May. And again the point here is to document the migration and upgrade process, go through it with pilot institutions, as well as detailing things like metadata mapping decision making remediation those kinds of things with a goal of eventually producing a toolkit for the community. So we're working with a couple of pilot partners, the University of Virginia which has fedora with a custom front end on it and then Whitman College which is an island or a user so these both have fedora three repositories in the back end but different front end so we're able to sort of run these pilots in different scenarios and help a broader swath of the community be able to benefit from the work. Phase two will start roughly in June running through to September. And the idea here is to take the toolkit that we've produced share it with the community solicit feedback and iterate as needed. And then finally the third phase, which will begin in the fall. So here is to host a roughly two and a half day migration training workshop that is intended to be free to attend, but the grant will provide some travel funding for folks that want to travel and attend the workshop might not otherwise be able to that just with a coven situation, we may need to have this workshop a little bit later than plan perhaps in the spring rather than in the fall, but that's still to be determined and that's something we'll work out over the next few months. And then finally, there's quite a bit of opportunity throughout this grant process for feedback iterations evaluations. Certainly once we organize the workshop will be soliciting feedback from attendees but also from folks that are trying out the the toolkit and and other materials that will be developing such as workshop content. And of course, once the grant ends we still intend to provide ongoing support, and this is largely accomplished through membership funding. So fedora is a community supported open source program that is funded, almost entirely through membership and we have members all over the world that use the software and funds staff positions and our ability to provide training and support software releases to the community. And of course, with budget cuts related to COVID this has been a challenge certainly in the last year. We've lost about 20% of our membership funding and are working to try to build that back up again. But membership is really crucial and the only reason we're able to still provide a similar level of services the same level of staff as we have past years really comes down to the grant support that we're getting at the moment but of course the grant is temporary. And so when that runs out we're going to need to build membership back up or else risk losing staff time and be unable to provide the same level of value and services to our, to our community so this is really critically important we're trying to get the software releases out on time support the community and adopting and migrating to to fedora 6.0 to really demonstrate the value of the program, but we're also working on things at a community engagement on the community engagement side of things. And for that I'm going to turn it over to Aaron who's going to talk a bit about coming into the program as a new as a new employee and working on the ways that we're engaging with our community. So thanks David. Yes, I'm Aaron and I'm the community program coordinator at fedora. When I first started I didn't have really any clue about digital preservation or about repository management. I come from a background in retail management so I knew engagement and I knew people, but those actually turned out to be really two good assets for me coming into this role. As a insider, when I was onboarding what I learned was that there was very little of what we were doing that was actually speaking to people like me so that really became part of my focus was trying to make fedora accessible to everyone and generate content that was going to be accessible to people of different levels so we wanted to, excuse me showcase our work and make sure that everybody could have access to it. So the first thing that we needed to do was actually just organize our content. In the past communication had been kind of ad hoc we were just recreating and repeating what we'd already been doing in the past. Some of it was working some of it wasn't we've been using multiple outlets to try to connect with our users in our community, and we really didn't have a plan for it. So what David and I did with we laid everything out on paper wrote it all down, and this inevitably led to the creation of our monthly communication strategy as seen next year. So this is a high level snapshot of all of our communication pieces it shows who's responsible for the content creation, when they're distributed where they're distributed and who's responsible for distributing it. So this really sets the framework for what we're doing to engage the community every month so obviously there's flexibility within that we can change the order around, but this is really the standard for what we're we're trying to accomplish. So I'll just run through it really quickly here for you. So every month we release a newsletter which is a recap of the events and the successes that we've had through the community over the past month. We also like to shout out our partner communities like San Vera and island aura, and let people know what's going on there. We also put out a, I am a last grant blog post so David writes that and it gets posted to our blog to keep the community updated on what's going on there. We also have committed to releasing a monthly demo video on our YouTube channel. So, in collaboration with the tech team and some volunteer committers we created a list of features that we thought would be exciting and fun for users to view, especially with fedora six coming up so close we we pulled the feature list from new things coming in fedora six so that our users could get a sneak peek at it as well as refer back to it after the software is out. So what we did is what's kind of fun for me as we did a general interest blog post so once a month, we try to do something a little more high level, a little easier to read a little more fun to give people a new way of looking at fedora so we showcase some different repositories, what people are doing with fedora. Most recently we just did a little meet the members blog post where we introduced people to some of our governance members. So this is really meant to showcase fedora in a different light for people. So through the creation of the calendar, we actually realized a few things and one of those things was that there were things that we were trying and doing that were not successful. So we're a small team we have limited resources, both time and money, and we really wanted to focus our approach on doing fewer things but doing them better. So what we did is we ended up ditching some of our low return channels in lieu of making quality items, you know, over quantity. So I think a lot of times people just think they should try everything and hope that something sticks. But when you're on a tight budget like this, it's really important to make sure that you're getting the best bang for your buck. So that's what we did. We really streamlined our efforts into the channels and places that we knew we would get the best return. And so one of the other things we're actually fortunate enough is to have some really great partner communities like san vera and island aura. We've been working with them collaboratively over the past few months to share best practices, learn from each other and we use this analogy of raising all boats. You know, we're really in this to help each other and see how we can draw on the resources that we have so that we can collectively do better for our communities, because that's really what it's all about. It's our communities and our users. And so lastly, one of the coolest things about me being new to the community and new to this industry was that I got to bring some really fresh new ideas and try new things. So this past holiday we actually did a really fun little engagement activity with our community members. We called it festive fedora frenzy and it was essentially a little multiple choice trivia game that we sent out every day for the days before the holidays, where people could answer questions they gained points and inevitably they got entered in a draw to win a prize. So it was kind of silly and it was something new never been tried before, but what it was it was meant to really reconnect people with fedora in some way and on a different level. So we got some amazing results from the participation in the activity. People really seem to enjoy it so that's a, that's what we're in it for is we're going to be trying more things like this, because our community has told us that you know they really enjoy it. So based on that, I want to show you some of the plans we have for the future so looking to the future based on what we've tried we are working with logo designer to come up with a brand new logo for fedora six so this is meant to represent us moving into the era of fedora and as such we're going to create this logo and its launch will coincide with the release of the software and we want to make this available to our users on things like shirts and mugs etc things like that. The other thing that we want to do is have a launch party for fedora six once the software is ready to go. And so what this is is really meant to be recognition for our contributors and all of the people that have helped get us to this milestone. So a celebration for all those involved as well as for the software itself. It's really important that we give recognition where recognition is due these people have worked very, very hard to get us to this point and it's definitely something that we feel we should be celebrating. And the other thing that we are planning to do is offering workshops on a regular basis, so that we can provide training opportunities to get the community more involved. So fedora six has some great new features and the aim of the workshops is to make sure that the community can successfully adopt the software, use it and be actively engaged with it so these are going to be offered regularly and at the needs of the community, so that they can, you know, continue to adopt and use the software. The reason that we're doing all of these activities is really for our users. It's important for us to let them know that we're here to support them and making sure that Fedora six is successful, and that we're securing our user buy in and our community buy in and adoption. We want to make sure that the community is seeing value in the engagement that we're offering through the training and the recognition and the support that we're providing. So we can get our community members engaged with us, the more that we know that Fedora will be top of mind and and that's really what what our goal is here. We want to make sure that we're giving our users what they're asking for. And so with that I'm going to pass it back to David and he will just wrap up for us here. So hopefully it gives you a sense of what's going on with Fedora this year, releasing Fedora six releasing the migration tooling, working on the grant to support migrations and adoptions and all the great work that we're doing on the community engagement side to make sure that for users are engaged and plugged in and have opportunities to use the software to get training when they need it to participate in community events together. We've included a few links here and we'll share the slides. So you can follow along with some of the things that we're working on such as the monthly blog post for the grant. You can join the conversation in Slack. And if you're not already a member, you can help us out by joining and supporting us so that Fedora can continue to be successful and sustainable into the future. Our email addresses are here if you want to get in touch with us and you can reach out anytime. Otherwise, thanks very much for your attention.