Like every year (since last year), the InvenioRDM community gathered for a week in March to discuss current trends and future developments of the open-source project. From the SharedRDM, opens an external URL in a new window team, Max Moser (TU Wien), as well as Christoph Ladurner, Eduard Nitu, and Laura Thaci (all TU Graz), attended.

Despite the name, it’s not actually even required to be part of the community already! It’s also a great opportunity for guests to get a glimpse of what's going on, and then hopefully decide to join the community later on. Not even physical presence was a requirement, as parts of the workshop were held in hybrid mode for those who were unfortunately not able to participate in person.

Perhaps this openness is part of the reason why InvenioRDM is so popular and actually still increasing in popularity? Either way, the community is healthy and growing – both with new faces participating, as well as new instances popping up across the globe!

The instance rodeo

The workshop started with a repository rodeo, where several community members had an opportunity to showcase the Invenio they have at home, with a particular focus on their own tweaks and the direction that they are going in.

Avid readers of our news will already know that our main focus is on curated records and large datasets. Fortunately, we’re not the only ones going in this direction, as there is a general trend towards increased utilization of (also partially automated) quality checks.

Other areas of common interest are the integration with other systems like GitLab, opens an external URL in a new window or Software Heritage, opens an external URL in a new window and, of course, classic enhancements like more user-facing features like advanced search, or download of individual files from ZIP archives.

The rest

The remainder of the workshop was organized as open space technology where a wide range of topics was proposed and discussed quite dynamically.

Unfortunately, neither cloning nor time travel are a thing yet, so we had to stick to a subset of the topics. Naturally, we primarily chose topic sessions that were related to our roles as developers and operators. Very pleasant outcomes on this front are the introduction of data type hints in the code base, the improvements planned regarding audit logs, glacier/cold storage of uploads, and, of course, the drafted roadmap for the upcoming v13 release (July, if you’re wondering).

We did not only have the opportunity to collect some knowledge but also to share some of our insights, e.g. about wiring up InvenioRDM with the eduGAIN interfederation, opens an external URL in a new window and collecting consent from users for data curation and processing.

As part of the core maintainers group, we also actively participated in the merge party sessions where a bunch of improvements were discussed and merged!

Until next year!

Overall, the workshop was once again both quite productive and enjoyable. and we’re looking forward to next year’s workshop in Graz!

Maybe then we’ll finally discuss the rewrite of Invenio in Rust, opens an external URL in a new window.

Material

Presentations will be added to the InvenioRDM community on Zenodo: https://zenodo.org/communities/inveniordm, opens an external URL in a new window

Contact

TU Wien
Center for Research Data Management
Favoritenstraße 16 (top floor)
1040 Vienna

research.data@tuwien.ac.at