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Preservation

By Pamela Jones et al.

I'm back from vacation, and I feel refreshed. Just before I left, I asked the members to think about what we should do with Groklaw now that Novell won, and SCO has filed an appeal. As I pointed out, Groklaw has achieved everything it set out to do, and since there can normally be no new materials introduced in an appeal, might this be a good time to take a breath and work on perfecting the work we've done? This could drag on literally for years, but it won't be events happening daily as it used to be, and so I had some suggestions on how I thought we could use the lull.

One choice is just to keep going as we were, covering other topics as we were and other cases; another was to stop and fix up any flaws in our historical collection of every important event in the SCO saga; and a third was for me to train others to at least do News Picks and the Timelines and maybe have guest articles while I worked on filling in the gaps.

I've read now what Groklaw members advised me, and I've decided. I think we need to use this time to perfect our work and ensure Groklaw's preservation. It will require shutting down the daily articles and News Picks, at least for the forseeable future, but I'm convinced it's important to do it. One of the core purposes of Groklaw has always been to create a reliable record for historians and law schools to use our materials to teach and inform.

There is a very big problem, though, with digital preservation. Many members raised that issue with me, and so I decided that we do indeed need to address that. A university professor, as it happens, is working on a digital preservation project with his students, and I have been offered an opportunity to pick their brains, and I'm definitely going to do that. Digital preservation is no mean trick, and just as Groklaw has been cutting edge in other areas, I want to make a contribution by doing all I can to make sure our work doesn't fade away. We put our hearts and souls into putting together this library of SCO, UNIX and Linux history, and libraries have their own requirements and standards.

I would truly love to do both, because I love doing Groklaw, but I don't scale, so I had to choose. And I choose to make sure our work as fully reliable, comprehensive and, to the degree humanly possible, permanent. After we get the preservation work in gear, I will definitely begin to explain how to do a site like Groklaw. I have had a number of requests for information on how to create a site where the atmosphere is kept polite, for example. Actually, that's a book in itself. But I'll tell you what I have learned. FOSS's strength is that there's no one throat to choke, and the more people who know how to do a site like Groklaw, the better off FOSS will be. So that's my decision.

Would you like to know how you can help?

Full post as published by Groklaw on January 06, 2009 (boomark / email).