Greetings @us-hosted users and @eaasi-alliance members!
This is a friendly reminder that our August EaaSI monthly call is tomorrow, Tuesday (August 2) at 4pm ET / 3pm CT / 1pm PT! Zoom details, calendar invite and running notes for the call can be found pinned here:
EaaSI Network Community Call Info - Updated through August 2022
Following on our June call, where we discussed EaaSI’s plans for the next two years - and some our capacity/scoping limitations in light of Phase 3 needs - I’d like to lead a discussion on various community-led ideas and resources that have been suggested as helpful or essential to EaaSI success over the past few years. Where can these efforts/advocacy find a sustainable/sustained home?
I am also including general announcements/updates from the EaaSI team below, and as usual we will hold some time at the top of the agenda for questions, but please feel free to respond below for more information/clarification as well. And do also let me know if you have any EaaSI-related news, updates, efforts, or anything else from your own work of late that you think would be of interest to everyone! We are always happy to hear from you 
EaaSI team updates for August 2022
- Start of Phase 3
- Third round of grant funding from Mellon and Sloan officially arrived in July (some Phase 2 funding and related deliverables have also been extended to the end of the year to help account for the various disruptions of the past few years)
- Dev review
- Seth, Ethan, Oleg, Claire, and Euan have been holding dedicated meetings to review dev backlog, system design, and re-analyze roadmap in conjunction with business/service planning timeline
- Meanwhile, migration of EaaS object archive to S3-compatible MinIO storage is complete; this “unlocks” planned updates to Emulation Project workflow in the EaaSI UI that will be the front-facing updates in an upcoming new release
- That said - ongoing climate and energy crises in Europe may continue to affect our development team in unexpected ways in the coming months, both personally and professionally; as always we appreciate your patience as we prioritize everyone’s health, safety, and sanity
- Embracing Change at Educopia
- In case you missed the big news from our friends at Educopia Institute - Katherine Skinner will be stepping down at the end of September after 15 years as Educopia’s Executive Director. You can read the full details on Katherine’s blog post linked above; but @jmeyerson will be serving as Educopia’s Acting Executive Director while their transition leadership team and Board work together (and with the rest of Educopia’s staff, Affiliated Communities, and assorted clients - like EaaSI
) to figure out Educopia’s next chapter and have new leadership in place in the new year. - (Jessica + Educopia will still be involved and assisting EaaSI in Phase 3 sustainability and business planning, as we continue conversations with Yale leadership this fall!)
- A hearty CONGRATS TO JESSICA and THANK YOU TO KATHERINE for your time, support, and forever being such thoughtful and gracious colleagues and partners in the field no matter the role!
- In case you missed the big news from our friends at Educopia Institute - Katherine Skinner will be stepping down at the end of September after 15 years as Educopia’s Executive Director. You can read the full details on Katherine’s blog post linked above; but @jmeyerson will be serving as Educopia’s Acting Executive Director while their transition leadership team and Board work together (and with the rest of Educopia’s staff, Affiliated Communities, and assorted clients - like EaaSI
- Student team updates
- The student Software Configuration team at YUL has remained active over the summer, and thanks to them (including new hires Dara, Esther, Aly and Jeff!) crossed a Phase 2 benchmark of 1000 new software environments created in Yale’s node. Congrats to them and Claire for her dedicated guidance and training!
- Conference updates:
- iPRES
- Euan will be presenting a long paper on the EaaSI program of work (co-written by much of the team!) on Tuesday, Sep. 13: “Useable Software Forever. The Emulation as a Service Infrastructure (EaaSI) Program of Work”
- In the same block, Raphael from OpenSLX will be presenting “A Generic Emulator Interface for Digital Preservation — Towards a Collaborative Distributed Emulator Registry”, which will be something of a sneak preview and insight into OpenSLX’s ongoing work to genericize the EaaS emulator registry (such that new emulators can be more easily and/or communally added or adapted to the EaaS framework)
- Registration (including online participation) is still available: https://ipres2022.scot/registration-2/)
- ARA
- Euan will also be presenting on EaaSI/emulation-related digital preservation design (“Reducing Costs and Barriers to Transfer with Whole-System Preservation” ) at the Archives & Records Association (UK & Ireland) Conference on Sep. 1
- iPRES
