The team is full, the audits are complete, it's time to meet up to talk about the next steps for the Islandora 7.x-1.13 release. If you are on the team, or just interested in learning more, you are invited to tomorrow's meeting at 10:00 AM Eastern. Agenda here, with link to the Zoom meeting.
Islandora Camp went to Switzerland for the first time this summer, with a three-day camp hosted by Lib4RI - Library for the Research Institutes within the ETH domain: Eawag, Empa, PSI & WSL, and located at Eawag. You can see the full schedule (and as many set of presentation slides as we could gather) here, but the highlights came on the third day, with:
The location itself was also a highlight, as we toured the peaceful, naturally landscaped campus of Eawag and hopped stepping-stones across the reclaimed river that runs through it:
Sessions were held in a low-energy building that deploys a myriad of clever tricks to provide a comfortable, modern, multi-storey office space while using no more electricity than a couple of single-family homes. It's also quite something to look at:
This Islandora Camp was the very first held since the release of Islandora 8, and our campers we eager to explore the new stack, with a half-day dedicated to site building Islandora 8 in the Admin Track, and the entire Developer Track spent (by audience request) on the new release.
If you want to experience your own immersion in all things Islandora, you can join us in October for our every-other-year full-week conference, Islandoracon, taking place from the 7th to the 11th in Vancouver, BC, Canada.
Islandoracon has always had a 'hackfest' component, but we've yet to do the same thing twice. We're trying a new format this year to give all of our attendees a chance to work together, learn new things, and produce a tangible benefit for the rest of the Islandora community: The Islandora 8 Use-a-Thon.
Islandora 8 is more tightly integrated with Drupal than Islandora 7, and very flexible, so many use cases can be solved with a combination of configuration and Drupal contrib modules. The Use-a-Thon will crowdsource use cases for things people might want to do with Islandora (i.e, a collection that can be viewed on a map; a collection with a commercial store component; a workflow for accepting and reviewing public annotations on objects). On Monday, October 7th, after we finish up the half-day workshops, we'll have a mixer at the Vancouver Public Library where attendees can form teams and talk about what use cases they would like to explore, either picking from the crowdsourced use-cases or inventing their own.
On their own, over the week of the conference, teams will take a use case and work to demonstrate how it can be done in Islandora 8 (with configuration and Drupal contrib modules), including documentation (“recipes,” for our shared Islandora Cookbook). Points will also be given for identifying gaps that may need further development work and creating issues to document those gaps.
On Friday, October 11th, we will gather again at the Vancouver Public Library where teams will have the morning to finish up their work and prepare a brief presentation describing what they have done. After lunch we'll watch presentations, pick winners and award prizes, and officially end Islandoracon. The rest of the day will be given over to an informal discussion of the future of Islandora (8, 9, and beyond) for anyone who wants to participate.
Use-a-Thon projects will be judged based on:
And, because we want to encourage you to make new connections at Islandoracon, we'll also award points for team composition:
(Credit to Open Repositories for their Ideas Challenge and points for team composition)
The complete five-day schedule for Islandoracon (October 7 - 11 2019) is now available! Please join us and our 43 speakers and workshops leaders for a week of the best in Islandora and an opportunity to get together and share.
Registration is open and the Early Bird discount is on until July 1st.The schedule at-a-glance:
View the Islandoracon schedule & directory.
If you would like to try Islandora 8 for yourself, we have three options for you:
The Islandora Foundation is committed to providing utilities for Islandora 7 repositories to make migration as painless as possible. All existing Islandora 7 users are encouraged to evaluate our migration tools and provide us with feedback. We are dedicated to working with everybody to make sure we all move forward together!
Here's a list of all the features currently available with the 1.0.0 release (including those that come for free from contributed modules):
This software is made possible by volunteer contributions from community members and organizations. Development, documentation, and testing are all significant undertakings that require time and effort. We thank each and every one of the people who have helped us deliver this software, to whom we owe a debt of infinite gratitude.
One of the features of Islandora events is the t-shirt given to all attendees. Every camp has its own logo, and so does each conference. We want to give a free registration and an extra t-shirt to the Islandoracon attendee who comes up with the best logo to represent our second conference.
Here are the first two:
Entries will be accepted through July 1st, 2019. Entries will be judged by the Planning Committee and a winner will be selected and announced in early July.
Here are the details to enter:
Thank you and good luck!
Islandora 8 will be released at the end of the month, on May 31st. Islandora's Tech Lead Danny Lamb is working with our amazing team of volunteers to fit every last feature they can complete and test before the deadline drops. If you're new to Islandora 8, have been waiting for a full release before you try it out, or are just plain curious about this new version of Islandora, we invite you to join us for a webinar on June 6th. Danny will provide an overview of the first release of Islandora 8, demos of some key features, and we'll end with a question period so you can ask about anything else you need to know.
Attendance is free, but registration is required. Please sign up here.
Want more information now? We've got some pretty solid documentation* you can read in advance of the meeting, and you are always welcome to drop in on our weekly tech calls to ask questions or just listen in.
The first release of Islandora will include the following (and maybe more):
* We're in release mode and things are changing fast, so some aspects of the docs will be updated with the release.
We've wrapped up yet another amazing community sprint. This time around, volunteers from 9 different organizations put Islandora 8 through its paces. Bugs and documentation gaps were uncovered as community members worked through an ever-expanding list of test cases. The Islandora 8 committers have responded to testing feedback, and we've already seen improvements roll in. There was even a special guest appearance by a wild Ruebot!
The Islandora Foundation would like to thank everyone who generously donated their time to critically reviewing Islandora 8 as it makes its way to release. Individuals from the following institutions actively took part in testing:
We'd also like to give a very special thanks to our committers, and in particular, to Natkeeran Kanthan, who showed tremendous initiative in collecting and documenting test cases.
And now that we've been through both a documentation and testing sprint, we now are making our final preparations before release. So mark your calendars, because we're releasing Islandora 8 on May 31st! We have a Github milestone set up that contains all the issues we'd like to resolve before then, so keep an eye on it to track our progress. When released, you can expect to to see the following features in Islandora 8:
And if what you're looking for doesn't happen to be on that list, we will be actively soliciting community input for what features to tackle first from our proposed technical roadmap. So be on the look out for more from us at the Islandora Foundation as we work our way through releasing Islandora 8!