Greetings @us-hosted Participants!
QUICK SCHEDULING NOTE: The July Monthly Node call is cancelled to provide everyone with an extended period to complete formal testing. We also acknowledge that this is summer in the northern hemisphere and many people are taking vacation around this time. We will reconvene in August with a focus on your experiences and findings from testing. We will also provide a more detailed development update at that time. Please keep an eye out for a cancellation message directly from Google calendar. For Outlook calendar users, you will need to remove the July Node call manually due to interoperability issues between Google and Outlook calendar applications.
First, allow the team to express our gratitude and warm appreciation for your investment of time and thoughtfulness as members of the EaaSI Network. As a designated pilot, the goal of this year’s activities with you all has been and continues to be "surfacing the known and unknown unknowns” so that we can ground development priorities, EaaSI service design, and fee structures on actual data and user experiences.
This message is a midpoint pilot update intended to clarify:
- Where we are in the pilot timeline
- Explicit expectations about pilot activities and EaaSI goals through the end of September
- Direction and areas of focus for the last quarter of the pilot (October - December 2021)
Where we are in the pilot timeline
As many of you may recall, the 2021 Hosted Emulation Services Pilot is scheduled to run through the end of the year. We’ve completed the onboarding period in which all of you participated in a series of structured activities: 1) completing your stakeholder questionnaire, 2) documenting your scenarios for use and access, and 3) describing software provided and a sample from your collections. Several forum discussions based on these activities have resulted in a rich body of suggestions, considerations, and priorities. We are currently in our Formal Testing Phase, which has extended into an open testing and experimentation period. This is open experimentation period is part of an intentional slow down on the part of the team that acknowledges both summertime in the Northern Hemisphere (during which several members of the staff and network participants take vacation), and the transition that many of our institutional colleagues will undergo in July and August from remote to in-person work.
Pilot activities and goals through September
The EaaSI staff (with special acknowledgement to Ethan and Oleg) has worked diligently to make sure the hosted pilot instances were ready to roll for formal testing. The release of the hosted instance was significant because it was the first release that combined the new EaaSI user interface with updates to the underlying code base.
From now through September, the EaaSI team will be focused on the following:
- Stabilizing the platform: The team is focused on scheduled rounds of code updates and bug fixes based on the results of your formal testing — inching closer to a “production ready”, stable version of EaaSI
- Bringing the locally hosted version of EaaSI up to speed, code-wise, with the hosted pilot instance so that nodes hosting EaaSI on their local hardware or in their own cloud infrastructure can have access to the latest features
- Documentation updates - in this period of iterative testing and improvement, Ethan will have the opportunity to return to the EaaSI user manual and update documentation to reflect the latest updates to the system
With a focus on these activities, the EaaSI staff will not be able to accommodate custom/on-on-one user support requests at this time - unless it is a major barrier to your participation in formal testing. It’s worth clarifying that Ethan wears more than one hat in the EaaSI universe: He is the Software Preservation Analyst at Yale University (your peer node) where he assists with Yale Library emulation services and manages a team of student staff, and he is also the User Support Lead for the EaaSI Program of Work. For the duration of the pilot, Ethan’s role as EaaSI User Support Lead will be focused on working through major bugs with Oleg and rolling out new functionality.
Areas of focus for the last quarter of the pilot
From October through the end of 2021, after the EaaSI platform/code is stabilized, the team will turn towards defining the EaaSI service model. The service model is inclusive of:
- Metadata for the EaaSI system - this work will happen on the backend first, and will show up as facets or newly supported features in the UI later on
- Many of you may be wondering about the overlap of metadata elements required in EaaSI and your existing/local descriptive and preservation systems. This is a great question to ask! When the EaaSI team is talking about metadata and expanding the EaaSI metadata application profile, we are talking about computing environments and objects (CD-ROMs, floppy disks, etc.), not the content that you might load into the environment for staff or end user access. We have to collect this metadata in a standardized way in order to
- Administer, and eventually automate, system workflows
- Push metadata from the EaaSI network to Wikidata
- Provide a robust search and discovery interface for the NETWORK and network-specific functionality - such as enabling institutions to request titles from one another, to make requests for environments that no participating institution has, and to prioritize requests made
- Documentation - ongoing updates to the EaaSI User Handbook and other documentation to reflect updates to the codebase, deployment and installation process, and the UI
- Costs/Fee structure
- What is the base number of support hours that will be available to EaaSI subscribers, and what types of support requests can be accommodated in that set of hours?
- How will the EaaSI team set up the pipeline for environment creation and configuration requests from Node subscribers? Who will be responsible for fielding these requests and what can Nodes expect in terms of timeframe expectations?
- Determining which EaaSI features and functionality comprise “core EaaSI” and which features (e.g., scientific reproducibility workflows) will be made available as add-ons to the basic EaaSI subscription
- Timeline for moving from the pilot hosted instances to pay-for-service model
- Runway to migrate work completed by nodes during the pilot period from the free, pilot instance to an updated, paid instance
What’s next for EaaSI Hosted Service Pilot Nodes
As mentioned at the beginning of this message, our August node call will focus on the results of formal testing. I will reach out to some of you to share some of your specific findings, and we will have some focused discussions about what you’ve learned. The EaaSI staff will also share some updates - and elaborate on the development roadmap ahead.
We also plan to check in with everyone in the August Monthly Node call regarding a series of roundtables we would like to plan with you all for the fall. These roundtables would be open to the broader digital curation community, advertised widely on community listservs, and intended to create a space where people that are curious about using emulation in their repositories can hear from colleagues and ask questions.
Thank you all for reading! Please reach out to me directly, or reply to this thread with any questions.
Sending friendly wishes,
Jessica