 Hi there, thanks for joining me today for our presentation on Fedora 6.0 and all the work that we've been doing over the last year on migration support and integration tooling that came about based on community use cases. So my name's Erin Griffith and I'm the program manager here at Fedora. Today I'm gonna walk you through some of the new features and highlights that you can expect to find in the latest version of Fedora, Fedora 6.0. We are currently awaiting a 6.2 release actually, which should be available for downloading and testing by the time you're watching this video. So at the end I'm gonna provide some resources and links if you're interested in seeing it live in action. I'm also gonna go through some of the integrations that we created based on community needs and talk about how we decided on feature updates based on feedback directly from our community members. And lastly, I wanna share the most important part of the presentation or the most exciting, which is the much needed migration tooling and documentation that was created as a result of an IMLS grant that was focused on Fedora 3.0 to six migrations. So let's get started. So for those of you who aren't familiar, Fedora is an open source repository system for the management and dissemination of digital content. It's especially suited for things like digital libraries and archives and allows both access and preservation. So it also is used to provide specialized access to large and complex digital collections of historic and cultural materials, as well as things like scientific data. So we do have a worldwide installed user base that includes a variety of academic and cultural heritage organizations. It includes universities, research institutions, university and national libraries, and government agencies, all of whom support open source projects just like ours. So what does Fedora 6.0 have to offer? Well, first off, Fedora itself is a digital repository infrastructure that provides robust preservation capabilities to your stack, whether that's a custom system or something like Samvera or an Islandora installation. So in 6.0, we actually eliminated our old mode shape backend and instead we've adopted the Oxford Common File layout as a digital preservation standard. So the OCFL standard brings robustness and transparency to your preservation layer. Also Fedora is standards-based. So in addition to OCFL or the Oxford Common File layout, Fedora supports multiple web standards, including REST for standard web API access, linked data, solid or web AC for access control. We use Memento for versioning, Activity Streams 2.0 for messaging, as well as compliance with the published Fedora specification. So just going into the OCFL a little bit more here, specifically this specification describes an application independent approach to the storage of digital information. So it's specifically designed to promote long-term object management best practices within digital repositories. So if we look at the five most important things of OCFL, the first is parsability. So OCFL is transparently parsable by both humans and machines to ensure that your data can be understood in the absence of the original software that created it. So it means it's human and machine readable and also it will survive long beyond the digital, or sorry, the piece of hardware that it was originally created on, hence the hand-reaching out of the rubble there. So OCFL also provides robustness against errors, corruption and migration between storage technologies by creating checksums of both content and the OCFL metadata. Another thing that is important is that OCFL provides versioning so that repositories can make changes to objects allowing their history to persist. So all your version history will remain in a standardized format. So it employs a forward delta approach to maximize compactness of the repository. And lastly, OCFL is designed to support storage diversity so that your repository can live on desk or any file system as well as cloud storage. So back to Fedora 6.0 features. So Fedora 6 supports performance monitoring and reporting capabilities with Prometheus and Grafana. So this is a new tracking and monitoring system that we have with 6.0. So these two offer a useful analysis of your runtime performance. So you get a nice clean dashboard to show what's happening in your repository at any given moment. So having these tools helped us immensely in the development of Fedora. We believe it'll be just as useful to anybody trying to understand what's going on within their repositories. So this version also offers a built-in simple search feature. So the search endpoint uses an internal index and it supports a small set of basic queries that should be useful for both developers and administrators. Just a note though, that this is not meant to replace a fully featured external search service like Solar. And we also have a wide range of migration support documentation now available for Fedora 6.0. It's meant to get you from all older versions to the most recent as well as validation tooling to ensure that all of your content is actually moved over successfully. So much of this was created thanks to an IMLS grant that was focused on creating the migration paths to Fedora 6.0, which I'm gonna talk about in a few minutes. So this brings me to a recent piece of development that the team has released since 6.0 was put into production, which is the Camel Toolbox. So the Camel Toolbox is actually a suite of microservices that provides a handful of integrations with Fedora. So Camel Toolbox is essentially an Apache Camel-based message application that allows you to integrate things like Solar, Sparkle-based triple stores, and any HTTP service. So we talk about community led development and this is a great example of this. So with the 6.0 release of the Camel Toolbox included with it is an HTTP forwarding microservice which allows you to integrate any HTTP-based service. So this was actually developed in partnership with our partners at Villanova University. So they were specifically interested in creating a custom search indexing solution but didn't really wanna worry about connecting their indexing endpoint to Fedora. So what was created was the HTTP forwarder and with this they're able to create an HTTP endpoint for receiving Fedora messages and then simply tell Camel where to post the messages. So in essence, the HTTP service allows you to wire your custom web service to receive activity streams 2.0, messages directly from Fedora. So some of the benefits of the updated Camel Toolbox are that it is a significantly simplified deployment which makes it easier for you to spin up an access. We always love that. It's packaged as an executable jar file that depends on a single config file. So it no longer depends on setting up an OSGI server such as carafe and we also have Docker images and a sample Docker compose script that's ready to go as well. So you can just bring up the infrastructure with a single command, super simple. So how did we get to this point? How did we decide and how will we decide where we go next? We talk about community led development and for the last several years the entire focus of our program was on hitting the 6.0 milestone. So in June, 2021 we were able to successfully announce that the full production release of the long-awaited software was ready to go. So the community rallied around its release. We celebrated, we had a release party to thank all of the community contributors that really helped make this dream a reality. But what was next for the future of Fedora? The team had been so focused for so long on 6.0 that we really needed to turn our attention back to the community and find out what it was they needed next and what they might be looking for. So how we did this is the first thing we did was we started by hosting a series of community information gathering sessions where we invited members of the community at large to come and sit down with the program team and members of the tech community to discuss their repository needs more generally and see if we could determine whether Fedora could help in any way. So we specifically targeted voices at institutions that are typically underrepresented in things like our governance conversations. We wanted to touch base with our users outside of North America and really hear what they were doing with their repositories and see if there was some gap that Fedora could fill or some way that we could help with the transition to 6.0 or lower that barrier for migration. So during these conversations we were looking for things like recurring themes. So whether that was something like a specific thing that an institution needed whether it was migration documentation or tooling, something like they couldn't migrate because they wanted a specific set of features. These were the types of things we were listening for and looking for. But it actually proved pretty eye-opening to us in that the community didn't actually have a long list of features or functionalities that they wanted to see in Fedora. As far as they were concerned, the software was working. 6.0 was stable and performant which is really kind of the best outcome for a new software release. But it kind of led us to the question what do we do now then? How do we continue to support the community? So to answer this, we turned to a community technology survey. So we crafted this through collaboration with the core committer team and we decided on a small subset of features that we kind of heard come up in both the info gathering sessions and throughout community conversations. And we put these all in a survey asking people to rate their interest and we sent out the survey to all of our mailing lists. So we tried to get it as far into the community as possible and in a different variety of ways. So the purpose was to see what priority items we could work on to help increase adoption rates for 6.0. So thankfully, we've been able to deliver on a handful of these features thanks to community input and development work. And in 6.2, you'll actually see it'll be one of the first releases that incorporate one of the pieces from the technology survey that was requested, which is pretty exciting. So in the background as well, we have also formed a strategic planning subcommittee to kind of help determine the future path of the program. So the subcommittee is formed by members of Fedora governance. And within the subcommittee, there are two smaller working groups and each working group is focused on creating actionable items for helping grow both the program and the community. So we're looking at two areas right now that we identified as opportunities, one of them being resources, so both people and financial and community engagement. So we've been very fortunate. We're using the It Takes a Village toolkit that was created by a team at LearSys to help identify our opportunity areas and help us create meaningful paths forward. So that work is ongoing and will be for a period of time. And of course, our last piece of community led development always brings us back to our weekly tech meeting. So we have an open tech call once a week where users and non-users can come and get engaged in the development conversation, bring your use cases, kind of pick the brains of the tech team and see how we can help in your situation. So next up for us is, as I mentioned earlier, one of the best things about Fedora 6.0 is the migration tooling and the documentation that we now have available that's intended to help get users to the most updated and supported version of the software. So as I said before, much of this work was done thanks to an IMLS grant that was focused on creating and documenting all of these paths to 6.0. So just a brief rundown of the grant. In 2020, the Fedora program was awarded the grant to develop pilot and document migration tools and pathways to bring Fedora 3.x users to the newest, most supported version of the software 6.0. So we do know that hundreds of institutions across the U.S. and abroad are still relying on Fedora 3.x and this continued reliance on that version puts the stability, security and accessibility and also the functionality of these repositories at risk. So it is old, it is no longer supported. So along with two pilot partner institutions, so the University of Virginia at Whitman College, we set out to create the migration tools and all necessary documentation that would then be compiled into a toolkit which would be distributed to users and the content shared through training programs and training videos to support broad community adoption. So that really was our end goal. The grant was broken up into three phases. So phase one took place in September 2020 to May 2021. During this phase, both partner institutions began documenting their migration and upgrade processes. All the documentation that was created was compiled into what will become the community toolkit. We also had the generation of first round of a lot of our migration toolings, excuse me, tools. And in phase two, which began in June, 2021, that process involved validating and iterating on the toolkit based on the upgrades and changes to the actual tools themselves which were created in phase one. So in phase one, we created a lot of the tools to help with the migration and phase two was really focused on validating that the tools worked, upgrading what needed to be upgraded and making sure that everything was functioning as it should. So in phase three, which is the last phase, we are currently in the planning stages now and this will see the creation of migration training content. So originally the intention was to host an in-person migration training workshop to deliver this content. However, as we've seen, COVID has forced us to reevaluate the feasibility of bringing together our global users for an in-person training. But the important thing here is to just highlight that the tooling and documentation that are now available to get all Fedora3 users to Fedora6 is available. So as you can see in the list here, we have paths and tooling available to get any Fedora repository that's 3.x or newer to Fedora6 via one of the pathways. There's documentation that coincides with each tool which was severely lacking prior to the grant work. And we also have a migration validator now, a tool that can confirm and validate that all of your content was moved over correctly and intact during the migration process which is proven to be extremely useful. So without all of this work, the community would still be stuck in older unsupported versions of Fedora, but now all pathways to six are open and our focus is on bringing everyone on board and forward. So on that note, I just wanted to take a moment quickly and thank all of our member institutions. Fedora is an open source software entirely funded by the generous contributions made by our members. Without them, we would not be able to celebrate the success of Fedora6 and any of the work that I've shown you here today. The grant work and all of our future planning that we have ahead of us is really the result of the financial support that we get from our members. So as I mentioned earlier, I'm gonna close out here with some helpful resources and links that point you to all of the things that I've shown you here today. We are encouraging everyone interested to download and give Fedora6 a try and let us know what you think. Test out the tools, go through the documentation and please feel free to join us in the community in whatever capacity you'd like. We are always welcoming of new faces and folks with open arms, even if you're not a current Fedora user, everyone is absolutely more than welcome. And of course, if you aren't already one, please consider becoming a member of the Fedora community. Your contribution will help ensure the long-term survival of this crucial digital preservation software and all of the valuable items contained within those repositories around the world that we're looking to protect. So thanks for your time. Again, my name is Erin and I hope to see you around the community very soon.