Good morning, @eaasi-alliance members and @us-hosted users! My apologies for the delayed reminder and notice/agenda re: the EaaSI Network call scheduled for later this afternoon. I have been struggling with a sinus infection this week and will remain unable to lead any planned discussion today.
However, we would like to keep the call today at least briefly open to celebrate the wonderful news in our Program Manager search, which you have hopefully all seen by now! Please feel free to still pop into today’s informal meeting to congratulate/welcome Wendy Hagenmaier in this new role.
Since Wendy will officially begin at Yale on August 21, rather than wait another two months before re-convening, we have also decided to move up the next EaaSI Network call to Tuesday, September 5th (at the usual 4pm ET / 3pm CT / 1pm PT time). We will resume meeting bimonthly for the rest of the year from there (which is to say, one more additional call in November) - I will update all the pinned EaaSI Bimonthly Network Call Info, including the provided calendar download, accordingly, and send periodic reminders.
Please find additional EaaSI team updates below; @ecochrane will be present today to field questions in person as able.
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Grant reporting
- Somehow we are already officially halfway through Phase 3 of EaaSI, and @ecochrane is preparing a report for Mellon and Sloan foundations on program progress in the first year of this funding round (July 2022 through June 2023).
- If you have any particular notes or accomplishments you would like to highlight about EaaSI use at your org during the reporting period - did you run a demo for your staff? Use the hosted service to provide a patron access to a collection item? Tie EaaSI/emulation usage into an initiative, policy, or grant proposal? - PLEASE LET US KNOW! Even anecdotes are helpful for us to include for the funders.
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Development Updates
- The dev team continues to work as quickly as possible to a new stable release of the EaaSI platform (our first supported successor to v2021.10). In addition to major infrastructural changes to the upstream EaaS server (adding support for distributed cloud deployments and configuration of external S3 buckets for resource storage), in testing the planned release OpenSLX has identified a number of issues in migrating Environment and Software metadata from older EaaSI versions.
- This is of particular concern with upgrading a deployment from 2019.11 straight to the latest codebase, identified in tests using data from Yale’s production instance of EaaSI; writing and testing migration paths to resolve these concerns is critical to allow Yale’s pool of pre-configured Environments to continue seeding e.g. hosted.eaasi.cloud and other new or existing EaaSI nodes in the Network.
- Our exact timetable for release remains TBA dependent on continued migration testing, but we will continue to update on progress as we can.
- Meanwhile, the OpenSLX team is actively experimenting with using Microsoft’s Playwright framework for as a method for adding automated UX/UI testing to EaaS/EaaSI development on GitLab. This would allow us (and the user community) to define user-facing workflows (such as the Testing Protocols we have used in the past for both testing new node installations and introducing new users to core EaaSI terminology and features) to ensure, in an automated fashion, that new commits to the EaaS codebase do not unintentionally break pre-existing functionality, and greatly speed migration testing in the future. It would also allow for open contribution from the EaaSI community to define EaaSI UI-related tests to ensure the integrity of favored local workflows in future updates/releases.
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Wikibase staffing
- With the Digital Preservation Coalition, Yale has co-sponsored the creation of a Preservation Registry Analyst position at the DPC. This position is meant in part to build on previous EaaSI-sponsored efforts on the Wikidata for Digital Preservation (WikiDP) Wikibase. (As a reminder, you can read about the purpose/intent of this custom Wikibase in Kat Thornton and Kenneth Seals-Nutt’s iPres paper from last year, and see the test MediaWiki front-end for that Wikibase here)
- This position will focus on documentation and greater community awareness, uptake, usage, and population of a DigiPres-oriented Wikibase and related registries, and we expect will work closely with the EaaSI team to leverage the Wikibase’s unique capability for storing software preservation, emulation, and EaaSI-specific metadata.
- The position will be managed by the DPC and thus subject to their UK-based staffing structure, but is open for remote candidates from around the world! Please share widely.
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Conference updates
- The iPres2023 schedule was released and will feature no less than 3 papers and a poster from EaaSI + OpenSLX team members; we hope you will join in the discussion, either in-person or virtually!
- Software Preservation After the Internet, Dragan Espenchide and Klaus Rechert
- Long-Term Preservation of a Software Execution State, Rafael Gischke, Klaus Rechert, and Euan Cochrane
- EaaSI Preservation of Mobile Applications, Euan Cochrane, Jurek Oberhauser, and Rafael Gischke
- Establishing an Open-Source Package “Archive” (poster), Euan Cochrane and Rafael Gischke
- The iPres2023 schedule was released and will feature no less than 3 papers and a poster from EaaSI + OpenSLX team members; we hope you will join in the discussion, either in-person or virtually!