Islandora CLAW

Back in September, the Islandora community completed its first volunteer sprint, a maintenance sprint on Islandora 7.x-1.x that cleaned up 38 tickets in advance of the 7.x-1.6 release (November 4th). For our second sprint (and likely for all sprints in the future), we moved over to Islandora's future and did our work on Islandora 7.x-2.x (also known as CLAW). With CLAW being very new to the vast majority of the community, we put the focus on knowledge sharing and exploring the new stack, with a a lot user documentation and discussion tickets for new folks to dig their teeth into. A whopping 17 sprinters signed up:

• Nick Ruest
• Jared Whiklo
• Melissa Anez
• Kim Pham
• Diego Pino
• Brad Spry
• Caleb Derven
• Lingling Jiang
• Danny Lamb
• Don Moses
• Lydia Z
• Luke Wesley
• Kelli Babcock
• Chul Yoon
• Sunny Lee
• Peter Murray
• Nigel Banks

We got started on Monday, November 2nd with a live demo of CLAW provided by Nick Ruest and Danny Lamb, which has been recorded for anyone who'd like to take it in on their own time:

And then a virtual meeting to discuss how we'd approach the sprint and hand out tickets. As with our previous sprint, we mixed collaboration with solo work, coordinating via the #islandora IRC channel on freenode and with discussion on GitHub issues and pull requests. We stayed out of JIRA this time, doing all of our tracking with issues right in the CLAW GitHub Repo. In the end, we closed up nine tickets, and there should be extra kudos for Donald Moses from UPEI, who was the sprint MVP with his wonderful user documentation:

• Creating Collections in Islandora 7.x-2.x
• Adding an object to a collection in Islandora 7.x-2.x
• Editing the Basic Image Form
• Creating a Taxonomy you can use in your Islandora Content Type

The existing CLAW Committers also tackled some more technical issues, such as Solr provisioning in vagrant or setting up the CLAW vagrant to easily deploy on Digital Ocean or Amazon Web Services.

Nick Ruest put together a pretty awesome visualization of work on CLAW so far, where you can see the big burst off activity in November from our sprint:

You should also note that even in the early days of the project, activity on the code is usually followed up by activity on the documentation - that's a deliberate approach to make documenting CLAW an integral part of developing CLAW, so that when you are ready to adopt it, you'll find a rich library of technical, installation, and user documentation to support you.

With the success of the first two sprints, we are going to start going monthly. The next sprint will be December 7th - 18th and we are looking for volunteers to sign up. This sprint will have a more technical focus, concentrating on improvements in a single area of the stack; PHP Services. We're especially looking for some developers who'd like to contribute to help us reach our goals. That said, there is always a need for testers and reviewers, so don't be afraid to sign up even if you are not a developer.

PHP Services description: Have the majority of RESTful services pulled out of the CMS context, and exposed so that Drupal hooks or Event system can interact with them. We've already implemented two (images and collections) in Java, and we'd like to start by porting those over. These services will handle operations on PCDM objects and object types. There are lots of different ways to do this (Silex, Slim, Phalcon, Symfony, etc...), but the core idea is maintaining these as a separate layer.

What about Chullo?

Chullo will be the heart of the micro services. If everything is written properly the code reuse will allow for individual services to be a thin layer to expose the Chullo code in a particular context.

The Islandora Foundation is growing up. As a member-supported nonprofit, we have been very fortunate to have the support of more than a dozen wonderful universities, private companies, and like-minded projects - enough support that within our first year of operation, we were solvent. As of 2015, we now have a small buffer in our budget, which is a comfortable place to be.

But comfortable isn't enough. Not when our mission is to steward the Islandora project and ensure that it is the best software that it can be. With the launch of Fedora 4 last December, we started work on a version of Islandora that would work with this new major upgrade to the storage layer of our sites, recognizing that our community is going to want and need to move on to Fedora 4 someday and we had better be ready with a front-end for them when the time comes. Islandora 7.x-2.x was developed to the prototype stage with special funding from some of our supporters, and development continues by way of volunteer sprints. Meanwhile, Islandora 7.x-1.x (which works with Fedora 3) continues to be supported and improved - also by volunteers. 

It's a lot to coordinate, and we have determined through consultation with our interest groups, committees, and the community in general that in order to do this right, we need to have someone with the right skill set dedicated to coordinating these projects. We need a Tech Lead.

Now to the point: we need money. We have a confirmed membership revenue of $86,000 per year*, which is plenty for one employee plus some travel and general expenses, but not enough to hire this second position that we need to get the project to the next level. About a month ago I contacted many of the institutions in our community to see if they could consider becoming members of the Islandora Foundation, and we had a gratifying number of hopeful responses (thank you to those folks!), but we're still short of where we need to be. 

And so, the Funding Lobster (or Lobstometre). In the interest of transparency, and perhaps as motivation, this little guy is showing you exactly where things stand with our Tech Lead goal. If we get $160,000 in memberships we can do it (but we'll be operating without a net), $180,000 and we're solid, and if we hit $200,000 or above that's just unmitigated awesome (and would get turned into special projects, events, and other things to support the community). He's the Happy Lobster, and not the Sad Lobster, because we do believe we'll get there with your help, and soon.

How can you help? Become a member. While it would be great if we could frame this as a funding drive and take one-time donations, since the goal is to hire a real live human being who will want to know that they can pay their rent and eat beyond their first year of employment, we need to look for renewable commitments. Our membership levels are as follows:

Institutional Membership:

• Member - $2000
• Collaborator - $4000
• Partner - $10,000

Individual Membership:

• $10 - $250+ (at your discretion)

There are many benefits to membership, including things like representation on governing committees and discounts at events. Check out the member page or drop me an email if you want to know more.

Many thanks,

- Melissa

_{* some of our members were able to allocate more funding to support 7.x-2.x development than their typical membership dues. It is currently unknown how many will be able to maintain that funding level at renewal, but yearly membership revenue could be as high as $122,000. I went with the number we can be sure of.}