This featured sponsor post is from Heather Greer Klein, DuraSpace Services Coordinator.
The DuraCloud team from DuraSpace is excited to be a part of the Digital Library Federation Forum 2018 and NDSA’s Digital Preservation 2018. Our participation wraps up a year of focus on expanding the community participation model of the DuraCloud open source project. We hope to share what we have learned about broadening participation in an open community project, and to learn from others about what digital preservation needs remain unmet by current community initiatives and software projects.
I will present at the DLF Forum 2018 to share what we learned this year when looking to expand who participates in open source initiatives, and how to incorporate non-technical staff into focused work to move the project forward.
We began this work in earnest when the ‘Open Sourcing DuraCloud: Beyond the License’ project was chosen for the Mozilla Open Leaders program. As a result of the 12-week mentorship & training program, DuraSpace staff developed an easy introduction to what DuraCloud is and why it matters; contribution guidelines; a roadmap for future development; and detailed opportunities for contribution. The DuraCloud team believes this community contribution model will accelerate DuraCloud’s growth into a truly open source project.
We have also expanded the reach of the DuraCloud service globally by bringing on our first ever Certified DuraSpace Partner offering DuraCloud services, 4Science, to offer DuraCloud Europe. This partnership has enhanced the software to allow for storage providers in multiple regions, and meets a critical need for preservation storage located outside of the United States.
Please visit our websites to learn more about the DuraCloud hosted service, find out how to contribute to the DuraCloud open source project, or learn about our DuraCloud Europe partnership. You can always email us at info@duracloud.org or DuraCloud Europe at duracloud@4science.it, with thoughts, questions, or suggestions. We look forward to seeing you in Las Vegas!