All,

Broadly speaking, the Infrastructure Working Group of the National Digital Stewardship Alliance will focus on the topics such as the development and sharing of tools for curation and preservation, and storage, hosting, migration, or similar services for the long term preservation of digital content.  It is ultimately your input that will determine the specific scope of activity for the group.

To that end, the working group contacts at LC are gathering information that will comprise a scope of work document for each group. To help track suggestions more formally we've implemented an IdeaScale instance, now officially open at ndsa.ideascale.com. IdeaScale is a free resource, but you do need to create an account.

IdeaScale has been used by the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC), the FCC's National Broadband Plan initiative, Mozilla Labs, and the Boy Scouts (!) amongst many others to collect ideas from their customers/stakeholders, give those stakeholders a platform to vote on submissions and then allow the most important ideas to bubble to the top.

We encourage you to utilize IdeaScale to submit ideas for the Infrastructure Working group and to comment on other postings to start the conversation on how to shape the output of the group. You are also free to submit ideas for other working groups, or to drop me a suggestion via email.

A more formal timetable will be released shortly for the development of the scope of work documents, but we are hoping to compile the top IdeaScale submissions by the end of September and distribute a draft scope of work by mid-October.

Submit Early and Often! We expect to continue using this tool to discuss topics beyond the initial brainstorming period.

We also hope to have the Co-Chair of the Infrastructure Working Group in place by Oct. 15. If you are interesting in filling that position (or nominating someone), please express your interest to me by October 1.

Best,
Leslie
------
Leslie Johnston
Manager of Technical Architecture Initiatives
National Digital Information Infrastructure & Preservation Program
Library of Congress
[log in to unmask]