Capstone meeting
On April 27th, the FCoP cohort leads, research fellow (Amelia Acker, PhD), and project staff convened for the culminating final meeting of the project to share lessons-learned and begin exploring an agenda for future work within the broad field of software preservation. The cohort leads each provided lightning talk presentations that covered the terrain of their accomplishments and surfaced issues that they feel warrant further attention beyond the life of FCoP. The project staff facilitated breakout discussions to collectively generate strategies to address some of these identified gaps. Dr. Acker then summarized her research findings and engaged the cohort around key themes that cut-across the various cohort sites with whom she visited during the active stages of the project. All of these creative exchanges throughout the day were ultimately synthesized and distilled into a draft Action Agenda that is being refined in these last days of the project and being put forward for consideration by current and future stakeholders, including funders, curators, educators, technologists, and hobbyists, among others.
June QCF
On June 9, the Quarterly Software Curation and Preservation Community Forum will feature an all-FCoP program! On the heels of the cohort projects coming to end, Monique Lassere, Jonathan Farbowitz, Tracy Popp, Cynde Moya, Lauren Work, and Wendy Hagenmaeier will discuss aspects of their projects, such as shared vocabularies for software preservation work, how the FCoP project aligned with their institutional priorities, and the use cases that emerged. The roundtable discussion will be moderated by Dr. Amelia Acker, whose research with the FCoP cohort will inform the proceedings. As always with the Quarterly Forums, there will be a planned discussion, followed by 15 minutes of audience Q&A. This is your chance to find the answers to all your burning FCoP questions– don’t miss it!
June release of deliverables
Starting in April, the FCoP project team (Jessica Meyerson, Matt Schultz, and Zach Vowell) teamed up with Kelly Pendergrast of Antistatic (http://www.antistaticpartners.com/) to design the communications strategy for the publication and release of FCoP deliverables. These project outputs can be thought of in three streams: 1) The story of cohort capacity changing over the 2 years of the their projects, 2) Documentation from across the FCoP project, and 3) An action agenda for organizations and funders. The deliverables include work created by the cohort members, the project team, and Dr. Amelia Acker in her role as the FCoP research fellow, and they will range from previously written blog posts to workflow templates to capacity building exercises. Needless to say, it will be a challenge to present the various deliverables in a coherent way, but that is where Antistatic will help, leveraging the new SPN website architecture to make it all navigable and user-friendly. Towards the end of June, we will begin communicating the roll-out of the deliverables, so stay tuned!
Beyond the June release, a few FCoP deliverables will appear over the next 12 months, even though the project has come to a close. Among these will be scholarly work that Dr. Acker hopes to publish, as well as one last piece of outreach that the cohort developed during their project time.