Update on Continuation of Work on Exploring Portability of Hardware Design and Documentation

Following recommendations made during DAPSI Phase 2 R&D (final report available here), work on implementing recommendations from that final report have continued, led by @hoijui of Open Source Ecology (OSE) Germany. Below are:

  • updates regarding the current work,

  • outstanding issues that need to be addressed,

  • recommendations from Robin on where the community should focus efforts to suport the success of the OKH-LOSH crawler, and

  • next steps

Current Work

Outstanding Items/Issues

  • Crawler chron
    • Manually created list of projects to crawl (.csv) file was deleted by user kasbah Make a data directory · iop-alliance/okh-search@d3a2504 · GitHub - Robin Vobruba restoring.

    • Regular schedule / chron needs to be defined for the crawler

      • How often should the chron run (> 1 min)?
      • Who owns/shepherds the chron (IoPA OKH WG Chair)?
    • Agreements with platforms (MOUs preferred) crawled need to be established to ensure that there is a shared understanding of:

      • What information is needed/shared
      • Speed of chron (some currently take up to 3 days to fetch, and information is incomplete)

@hoijui will be approaching this work by separating platforms into two groups moving forward:

  1. Well Supported, such as Appropedia, Github, OSHWA

    • Well supported are platforms that are either file-system-based (e.g. git based) and have a useful search function, like github, or those that give easy access to all their relevant data, and generally have fewer projects, like appropedia and OSHWA.

    • Well supported means: we will try to keep a relatively up-to-date list of projects hosted and their current meta-data. For the Low support platforms, we basically just maintain more or less what is already there in the crawler, and rather focus on manually requested, one-time exports of the data of specific projects, to provide easy means for projects to move away from these platforms.

  2. LOW Supported, such as Thingiverse and Wikifactory

    • @hoijui chose this separation, because platforms like Thingiverse have no interest in 3rd parties to export meta-data, or even whole projects from their platforms, it is not a part of their business model. We should focus our efforts where they may bear fruits, and prevent frustration as well.

Next Steps

  • Restore file deleted from GitHub Make a data directory · iop-alliance/okh-search@d3a2504 · GitHub - Owner: @hoijui - DONE

  • Schedule OKH WG meeting - Owner @schutton, with agenda items pending (DONE, indicate availability here):

    • Define chron schedule - Owner: OKH WG
    • Define chron owner/shepherd - Owner: OKH WG
    • Define MOU for platform agreement(s) - Owner: OKH WG
    • Identify community member to negortiate MOUs with identified platforms, following vote - Owner: OKH WG
  • Review platform crawl list - Owner: @schutton (post vote to community forum, following OKH WG meeting)

2 Likes

Has any thought been given to GitLab instances? The downside is the search is less good on GitLab. But Gitlab is very important:

  • Gitlab.com is home to the GOSH community and to the OpenFlexure project.
  • A number of OpenHardware groups run their own GitLab instances such as CERN’s Open Hardware Repository or FabCity Hamburg’s GitLab.

Yes, it absolutely has! I will let @hoijui field this one, since he has looked into it and brought it up during our conversation last week.

This reminds me of yesterday’s conversation with Silona Bonewald on building a community to gather change requests for platforms including gitlab.

Indeed - I think I mentioned that at some point during today’s meeting as well! I’ll see if she has the bandwidth to jump into this thread as well.