 Hi there, my name is John Palfrey and on behalf of the Digital Public Library of America Steering Committee, I wanted to give a brief update on the project as of April 2012 and to provide a little context for what we've been doing over the last several months via this short video. So if you've been following the project at all over the past year or so, we're in a planning phase which is roughly speaking two years in duration, we're about a half-way through it. We're aiming toward a launch of the Digital Public Library of America in 2013 in April, so we're about a year from that launch. I wanted to give you a sense of where we stand in that trajectory and welcome you to the project if you haven't been working on it and to thank those of you who may have been working on it quite hard over the last year plus. So the way in which the project has been working has primarily been through a series of six work streams. We've been extremely lucky to have six extremely strong communities developed around a series of different issues and those work streams have been taking up a series of hard questions about what the DPLA is and what it might be. So even though we can't say exactly that the DPLA is something in particular, yet we're still in the process of defining that as a broad community which is part of our design over this next year, we're getting closer and closer to something that is clear and is something that we can build to her and our goal is to have a very robust work plan for what a DPLA will be as of April 2013 and most of the work to defining that is happening in series of work streams. So just for instance, the audience and participation work stream has had a series of workshops. It's got two terrific co-chairs in Peggy Rudd, the State Library of Texas and Carla Hayden, the Director of the Public Library in Baltimore and they've been convening a series of discussions about the people who might get involved in the DPLA, who it's serving, what some of the use cases are, what some of the benefits are. That's one of the most important things that we need to develop over the course of this first year. Likewise, David Ferriero and I have been co-chairing the governance work stream. This is one that's seeking to determine whether or not the Digital Public Library of America will be a new kind of institution. Will we create a new 501C3, for instance, or will we morph into an existing organization? One very important point I'd like to make on the governance front, whether or not we determine a particular format of the DPLA going forward in the next few months. One thing we know for sure, which is we have been hosting this project at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University as a research project, in essence, a grant funded research project. We know that we will spin it out of Harvard as of April 2013, give or take a few months. And I, as the chair of the steering committee, and as one of the Berkman Center directors, will be stepping down in that role as of our spinoff. So we know for sure that it will not continue to be at the Berkman Center after that point where we've taken on this role as incubators, but we're seeking to find the next home over the next year. And that's happening in particular in the governance work stream. Another thing we've worked on in the governance work stream is a series of open meetings protocols, and we're hoping to roll those out over the next several months. We want to be an open and transparent organization that not only allows for broad participation, but also enables people to understand what's going on, even if they're not participating, if they just want to understand the process as it goes along. Now, there are the work streams is the legal work stream. That work stream chaired by Pam Samuelson and Jim Neal has been taking up the many difficult legal issues. They're developing amazing work around orphan works in particular. We've got research going into privacy and access issues and so forth. Legal work stream is, as we all know, a very, very important development in the project, and it's something that will be an ongoing focus. So in each of these work streams, there's very important work going on. I could spend the entire video going work stream by work stream, but I would urge you to go to the DPLA website, dp.la on the web, and you can follow along work stream by work stream. And I urge you to get involved, whether it's in the business models work stream, the technical aspects work stream, the ones that I've just mentioned, and so forth. Those are places that you can dive in and make a difference through the DPLA. And if you have content, for instance, that you would like to contribute to the DPLA, or you have things that we ought to work on the content and scope work stream would be the one for you co-chaired by Rachel Frick from DLF. So there are six work streams. We encourage you to get involved through those. And ultimately, the work streams will be feeding their decision making as well as their recommendations up to the steering committee of the DPLA. We'll be having a series of conversations where we'll tee up the hard questions for the DPLA going forward and the steering committee will be rendering notional decisions out over the next several months. The next point at which we're all meeting is an open public meeting, a big plenary meeting that's taking place in San Francisco. That'll be April 26 and 27th. I understand we have about 300 registrants already and I think the capacity is about 350. So if you're interested in joining us for our West Coast plenary, we'd love to see you. Please do sign up for that. It'll take place on the first day at the San Francisco Public Library. And the second day, we're hosted at the Internet Archive. Special thanks to Luis Herrera at SFPL and to Brewster Kale and his team at the Internet Archive for hosting us on the West Coast. This will be both a lot of fun, I'm quite sure, but a chance to join all of these issues. Some of the ones I mentioned will be coming into discussion and I hope that you will come to the event and help us imagine what's going on. So that's the overall picture of where we're at and how the work is proceeding. There's another angle to the work, which is the early stage of technology development. I mentioned the technical aspects work stream, but technical aspects work stream is also guiding the work of an interim tech development team, a couple of whom are based here in the building I'm working in, actually, the Harvard Law School Library down in our garden floor, on the first floor, just a little bit below the surface. And this team, including David Weinberger, my colleague here and several others, are building an open source prototype that will be something that people can code against. We've got a group of friendly white hat hackers, as they're called, coming for Hackathon tomorrow to do some development against this platform. They've posted a scope document for what they're developing and what they see the future of the DPLA platform as being. They're trying to look out across the landscape and see what's been developed, particularly in open source communities, where we don't need to recreate the wheel, where we can bring things together. Pet enormously helpful guidance from Mackenzie Smith, who's consulting on the project, a bunch of other people who are helping to guide that development process. And also to figure out, obviously, once the interim development team has done its work, how to have a sustainable ongoing development effort to get us to a full prototype. We'll have a full prototype of some sort by April 2013. Hopefully some of the beta sprinters who have developed code related to the project will also agree to develop on top of this platform. So we're hoping to have something that people can start pushing against. We won't have, I think, a full blown system until some time from now, but we'll at least have something notional that we can iterate from and it will give a much greater sense of what the DPLA will be like when it's instantiated in code. And it's mostly, again, thinking about the plumbing initially, and you can see that from the scope document also on the website. And please do send feedback if you have views on that score. So those are the primary updates as of April 2012. I hope that you will join us online on the web. Again, http colon backslash backslash dp.la is the primary website that leads off into the wikis and to the online discussion spaces, in particular the list serves. And there's a lot of material that's going up on these sites and we very much hope you will engage with it there also that you might agree to show up in San Francisco, April 26 and 27th, and get engaged in the work as we enter our last year of the planning process, which will run from April 2012 to April 2013, at which point we hope to launch a full scale DPLA effort. With that, I'm John Pelfrey and signing off from Cambridge, Massachusetts. Thank you so much for your interest in the Digital Public Library of America project. Take care.