In this webinar, David Myers (Arches Project, Getty Conservation Institute) and Andy Jones (Historic England) presented the various ways to participate in the Arches open-source community, from Arches user groups and events to software and data modelling contributions and much more.
This session builds directly upon an earlier 2023 webinar, “Introduction to Open-Source Software Projects,” available here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u9NYvRoJw9I
Presenters & Moderators:
David Myers, Getty Conservation Institute
Andy Jones, Historic England
Nina Young, Getty Conservation Institute
Thank you all for waiting and thank you for joining us for this Arch’s webinar on participating in the Arches open- Source Community my name is Nina young and I’m an arches project team member at the Getty conservation Institute and today’s moderator presenting first is David Myers my colleague from The Arches
Project team at the GCI we’re also very pleased to have with us Andy Jones who is a software development manager with historic England David will provide an overview of today’s topic and Andy will share his team’s experience at historic England as an Arch’s implementor and active Community member and
Contributor before we get started I would like to mention some housekeeping notes we will hold a Q&A session at the end of the presentation so if you have a question about today’s Topic at any point feel free to enter it into the zoom Q&A interface the chat function is
Disabled so please use the Q&A interface for any questions if someone has asked a question that you ALS also want to know the answer to you can upvote that and we’ll definitely um get to answering it if you need captions this webinar offers live captioning which you can enable by
Pushing the CC button on the bottom menu you should have already been alerted that this webinar is currently being recorded and we will make the recording available within the next week you will be notified of this if you registered for the webinar or if you follow us on
Our social media channels or are a member of The Arches Community forum and with that I will turn it over to AVID for his presentation thank you Nina and thanks everyone for joining today’s webinar um I’d like to start by mentioning that this webinar builds directly upon the webinar that we held
In August of this year introduction to open source software projects which was presented by open Tech strategies if you haven’t viewed that webinar you can find a video recording on the videos page of the arches project website while that webinar mostly highlighted important points about open source software
Projects from a general standpoint in this webinar we’ll look specifically at the arst project and how to engage and participate as a member of The Arches Community uh before we turn to that subject of engaging in the community I think it’s helpful to first set the
Context a bit by explaining why the GCI and original partner World Monument spun chose to create arches as open source software first the mission of the GCI is to advance practice in the conservation of cultural heritage internationally and uh with the similar mission of the World Monuments fund and
We created arches to serve that mission we decided to create arches after observing over a number of years a widespread need in the Heritage field internationally for modern purpose-built software for cultural heritage data management because Heritage organizations around the world tend to be underresourced we also wanted to make
Sure that arches would be economical and this informed our decision to create arches is open source software and our CH choice of the software license as was mentioned in the prior webinar on open source software project a primary reason we chose the AG gpl3 open source license is that it requires
That when anyone improves arches and puts it online they’re obligated to share those improvements with the rest of the community and we believe that using this license would help Heritage organizations around the world to benefit from each other’s Investments and also pull resources to make enhancements the GCI is also a nonprofit philanthropic
Institution so we were also attracted to the community oriented nature of Open Source projects and the ethos of community members contributing for the greater good over time we found that as more individuals and organizations get involved in the community and as more of them contribute this can result in a
Virtuous cycle that has sometimes been described as a network effect this diagram demonstrates the network effect using the example of the invention of the telephone and the potential for interactions two phones being connected results in one interaction five phones on the same network results in 10 interactions and 12 phones leads to 66
Interactions in terms of the Arch’s Community is the number of those involved continues to grow there’s a multiplying effect in terms of the possibilities for community members to share work products including software enhancements as well as expertise and experiences as this quote notes a network effect occurs when a product or
Service becomes more valuable to its users as more people use it we would say that arches becomes more valuable as more people and organizations are engaged in the community with the way that open source software projects work engagement in the community can be both good for arches as
A whole so everyone gets better software as well as good for more particular interests of an organization or an individual having set that context let’s jump into the main focus of the webinar about participating in the community as you can see on the Arch’s website to the
Upper right you can access a menu called community and there you can find a great deal deal of useful information about how the community collaborates a web page under that menu is called participate in the community and this provides a list with links to further information about a number of specific ways to
Participate and I’ll be touching on uh most of those avenues for participation now but we encourage you to take a look at this web page after the webinar for more information one other thing to point out under that menu is the rs’s community code of conduct the code of conduct sets
Expectations about values tone and other as aspects of Good Conduct and includes guidelines for commercial entities such as technical service providers through to the code of conduct we aspire to Foster collaboration collegiality and inclusive and welcoming community to start participating first place that we recommend is the Arches Community Forum
Here you can introduce yourself ask questions about ways that arches is being implemented by others and seek out solutions to technical issues after you’ve gained some experience you can provide feedback to help others and learn about and share announcements and input on Arch’s development discussions another way to participate in the
Community is through Regional or topical arches user groups these groups are self-organizing and to date user groups have been formed in the UK and the United States you can go to the links on this web page to find out more about either of those two groups including when their next meetings
Are and the same web page provides guidelines and resources for creating a new user group another way to participate is to contribute to and share translations of the Arch’s user interface or review the translations of others Ares community members can help localize the software user interface through collaborative translation work
Into multiple languages The Arches project uses trans effects is the platform for collaboration on trans and to make those translations available to others for use in their own own arches instances here you can see the languages for which translation work has been contributed for Arch’s version 7 one way to participate that we
Enthusiastically encourage is to share your Arch’s deployment which can be beneficial in several ways one way way to share is to share information about your deployment with with the Arch’s project team to add to the who’s using Arch’s web page this allows others interested in Arches to
See the variety of uses of the software in terms of use cases and types of cultural heritage dealt with the kinds of organizations using arches and the geographic diversity of users community members can also write blogs or articles about their deployment such as the blog interview with the
Historical maps of Kia team that we recently published online community members can also share their deployment through presentations as the dun Wong Academy team did earlier this year in Australia word deployments can be shared through online webinar presentations like this as was the case with the greater London implementation a few months
Ago as I mentioned sharing your deployment can provide a number of benefits these include making others in the community aware of your deployment and of possibilities to collaborate in mutually beneficial ways as I’ll discuss shortly this could include sharing software enhancements sharing softare W packages and sharing controlled vocabularies sharing deployment
Experience can be helpful to others in the community and can encourage useful feedback about your own deployment this can also show the utility of arches to those evaluating the software anyone has gone through the process of evaluating software can understand how that can be helpful this also has the potential to
Expand the Arch’s Community which can lead to possible benefits across that Community as I mentioned another very beneficial way for Arch’s implementers to participate is through contributing and sharing software packages as well as vocabularies arches has been designed in a modular and flexible way and one of
The benefits of this is that different arches implementations can share their work configuring and customizing arches this can mean not only sharing new functionality but just as important sharing resource models and any Associated configurations and customizations an example of this is the Arches were hr’s project historic England in collaboration with the GCI
And Lincoln City Council will making will be making the resource models control vocabularies consultation workflows and code customizations belt for the greater London historic environment record available to the entire community and this is especially helpful for English historic environment records that adhere to the same standards this slide shows
The current package Library that’s in the process of being updated to better accommodate the submission of packages projects and applications for use by the entire community in the meantime if you’re interested in sharing your work with the rest of the community please let us know via the community Forum sharing controlled vocabularies
Can help community members who have a similar use case the creation of control vocabularies requires a lot of research and knowledge organizational work and by sharing this work with others in the community you help others to avoid Reinventing the whe as well as help standardize termin terminology across different implementations of arches
Recently the mapping the archaeological pre-colombian Heritage of South America project shared news of their work in creating a cultural affiliation thesaurus shown here after an AR’s project creates vocabularies The Next Step could be to share arches the Sor files with others in the community who might be interested
In incorporating their own that work in their own Arch’s implementation sharing arches deployment can help make others in the community aware of where there’s potential Val value ensuring software packages and vocabularies the Arches project also welcomes Community participation in creating and improving the official arches documentation improving the AR Arch’s
Documentation is a way that even small contributions can benefit the whole Community good document mentation is fundamental to the success of software people need to know how to install it how it works and how to use it members of the community help ensure that the documentation keeps up with
Arches by identifying errors omissions and topics needing update is shown here just like the Arch’s source code itself its documentation is maintained under Version Control at G GitHub GitHub issue tracking for documentation as shown here facilitates collaboration and keeps track of the history of contributions and changes to the
Documentation The Arches Community also welcomes collaboration in the development and maintenance maintenance of the software code itself this web page from the Arch’s code repository on GitHub shows co-development of new code to enhance Arch’s web accessibility features with it staff from historic England taking part for software developers open source
Development is very attractive they can learn through mentorship and collaboration and they gain greater recognition for their contributions but you don’t necessarily have to be a software developer to help anyone can submit submit bug reports and feature requests to improve the software one other potential way to participate
Is to become an Arch’s commercial service provider the Arch’s website includes a page of current technical service providers who have demonstrated the ability to implement and customized arches and who have agreed to abide by the community code of conduct this page provides guidance for additional service providers to be recognized there as
Well community members can also provide input on the Arch’s software roadmap which is published on the Arch’s website Community meetings of arches developers provide one Avenue for discussion in input on the software road map and uh here you see a recent Forum post on a developer meeting planned for
March 2024 and discussion of an agenda on the Forum last but not least Arch’s community members can support software enhancements that the entire Community can benefit from for example in Arch’s version 7 the Arcadia fund supported internationalization of the Arches platform and in version 7.3 the Auckland Council in New Zealand provided for
Development of a single sanon function for the platform which provides for greater security and compliance for an organization historic England has also supported Arch’s software enhancements which Andy Jones will speak to shortly I’d like to sum up about participating in the community by saying that as the Arches community continues
To expand the possibilities for sharing work products and software code that is relevant to other community members continues to multiply the more that community members engage the greater the value for the whole Community before I turn the webinar over to Andy I’d like to close by briefly mentioning the Arch’s governance
Initiative which is an undertaking of the GCI to plan for the long-term governance and sustainability of the Arches software and the open source project through this initiative we’ve identified two near objectives which are first to create a governance framework for stakeholder participation in determining future priorities for the Arch’s software
Project we’ve already created an external Advisory Group to provide input on this planning and the GCI is looking to create more full-fledged governance body Poe bodies to provide for decision making with Arch’s stakeholders and second we’re looking to establish Pathways for external funding and in kind contributions to support the
Arch’s software and project into the future we will be updating the community as our work on this ini initiative progresses in the meantime you can find additional information on the Arch’s governance IND initiative web page also under the Community menu this page includes frequently asked questions with answers
As well as Direction on sharing input so this includes concludes my part of the webinar presentation so I’ll turn it over now to Andy thanks David let me just share my screen okay um well thank you very much for having me here today um to really talk a little
Bit about my team’s experience on the arches open source community so from a development team’s perspective other members of the organization obviously been involved but this is just a a taste of what we’ve um we’ve been doing so um as I said I’m software development manager at historic England I’ve been
Here for 13 years and I manage a team who are responsible for developing maintaining and integrating uh Arch’s applications within the organization and we started working with arches around five years ago now where we ran a prototype project for for aerial photography um using arches just
To see kind of what its capabilities was and since then we’ve gone on to successfully migrate two of our major systems to arches so the um National record of the historic environment internally uh called Warden and more recent the greater London historic environment record which um we completed
Earlier in the year internally uh and we’ll be looking to to make that uh more public soon and we are also in the uh early stages of developing a new Maritime record system so we’ve we’ve we’ve been doing quite a bit since then um and during that time we’ve as a team gone
Through quite a transformation so significant changes how we work um the processes we we we undertake how how we approach software development and changes to the scope of our work um and really all of this has been influenced by the the nature of Open Source and and working within that that collaborative
Community there we go so I think to begin with I wanted to just to start looking at how the how the team has changed over that time and and that differences between how we were then and how we work now so when when when this skipped off we had limited
Experience in open source um software development we were a single in-house team working um on projects for a specific business units and they were custom built from the ground up often with proprietary software tailored really to to exactly what we needed and we had our own approach to to building
This and and deploying systems um that was under our our full all controlled we knew exactly uh how we wanted to do it so five years ago when we when we made that transition to start start working with arches we found our ourselves in uh we needed to we found we needed to
Make quite a few changes to how we how we did go about things how our processes for code management worked how our work planning um needed to needed to be done because we were no longer in a vacuum we we were working with a with a with other
Teams um we were now working on something that wasn’t our own so we weren’t we weren’t in control and um and we noticed they tended to change almost every day so it’s kind of keeping up um with something that was quite organic at the time and and um kind of add to all
That it was a new piece of software so there it was quite a steep learning curve getting used to something new but also the the way that that that it was built with was developed and and the prices around there um but what we found after um some early
Stumbles that actually it wasn’t just us on our own kind of struggling with something new we were actually part of what was really a distributed team of other developers and um instead of you know looking for support within your own team as you start something you we were
Able to look outward and draw on the experience of um other developers uh through through that Community model that that helped support us as change um we started engaging with other external developers to to benefit from their broader experiences at the time um and over time obviously we were able to then
Start helping others um and and help people solve issues and work out Solutions we began ches made as part of um made that part of our process um and that was really to help us plan features um and also see where people were already doing the things that we needed
To do which um is often a a nice surprise because you know you’re going to save a bit of time a bit of time so that was great and and planning um starting to now plan core features around a contribution first pattern um that um provides us with that
Community Support by by making it um a core piece of code and really the the distributed team help us with kind of running through that quality and Assurance part of the review process um you know making sure that it’s consistent and um it’s also usable and represented for the by the whole
Community so looking at some of the specific ways um we tap are in the open source Community obviously as a development team um we are primarily engaged through contributing code and working on the code within arches um as we Implement arches instances of our own
Uh for our own use cases um you know we’ve found things that it it can’t do or things that we need to change to make it better for for our requirements um and the open source model means that we are able to add those things which is um
Which is great so some of the notable things that we’ve done over the last couple of years are um to name a couple we’ve added HTML format exports for for when using search so um not just exporting the data but also being able to export something that
Is presentable and can be sent to um to Historic England customers and members of the public um to to kind of give them a great experience and also something that’s um you know accessible for for people we also um were looking we also needed
To be able to serve the some of the G spatial data that um arches contained to GIS clients or be able to then serve it onwards to other systems um and we found we we we needed something that that worked live it was easy to configure um
Nice and nice and quick it performed well and also supported our um our ezri uh estate as well so we have a lot of people using the the ezri desktop product so we wanted to make sure that it it was compatible with that so we we built that capability into the Arch’s
Database database um which leverages the the powerful capabilities of post postgis that it sits on top of um this is uh can’t really managed directly in the day space at the moment um we we it’s in it’s in a preview and we are hopefully going to be getting to um
Build the the user vase um on top of that pretty soon to make it um again another another core component used by by everyone um and something that David alluded to um is our um Improvement to accessibility within arches so as a a UK government body um we’ve got to ensure
That uh the applications we provide meet web content accessibility guidelines um and we must show that where an application doesn’t meet those there is a plan to compliance and um that that we’re going to do it so we worked on this internally for a number of years on our own
Implementations but over the last um six months or so we’ve um been working with uh farralon and uh as as a community development developer team sorry to um make it a core feature uh and and really you know with something that we’ve been building over the over the last couple
Years and we wanted to make sure that it was um you know available to to a wider group of users and everyone was going to obviously benefit from that and one thing to note with this one is is because it touched on such a large part
Of the the application it did fall part of the the road map for for version 7.5 that is um that is hopefully soon to be relas so um yeah being part of that road map meant that um more people were able to to be aware of the change and um know
That it was coming and and adapt accordingly so as as well as those features um we also um fix things um bugs being a major uh issue for for us all um when we when we started working on it uh we our implementation’s run on top of a Windows infrastructure and um
Fairly fairly quickly we ran into a number of issues with there because I know a lot of the most of the development teams don’t use window so um pretty much almost all of our kind of early contributions were around addressing window specific issues but but um you know that that was great and
Um we knew that we were helping through those contributions for the people who are going to come on on on on Windows platform and and and help them um and all of this while we were doing this um we know we were getting to know the the the development team um
Within the commun they were helping us review refine and really get used to it uh and yeah as well as these the features and the changes and the fixes that we put and we also made sure that all of these changes we were doing the features we were building had um
Documentation that was contributed to Arch’s docs so pretty much everything um above is now in there including the the information on the um the preview feature of spatial views um so I’ve kind of glossed over quite a lot of the challenges I think at this point that that we went through doing it
Um it was a transition and one of the things um moving into working in in open source development was um really appreciating the importance of getting the code in and contributing it to the project from an early stage so we we did experience quite a lot of technical debt when we
Were um kind of getting up to speed things and and for those who don’t know technical debt is is one of the things where you build um customizations into into your own implementation but then there’s a requirement for you to maintain that long term and um as time
Goes on and you customize more that becomes an unmanageable um situation to be in so we um we needed to make that shift to to contribution first which which was um certainly a kind of an unusual situation to us you know we were going to be building these features into
Code that we were then going to bring in but um what what it really uh amounted to was that it provided um us with um you know a method of supporting our code um through that that that Community model which is actually an incredibly valuable asset for us to have um and
Then by moving to this this contribution first approach we had to change how we planned our releases we had to make sure start making sure we were aligning with um archers release The Archers release cycle where possible um and and starting to look at how we would need to
Coordinate working a little bit more with the community to ensure the features we were working on made it into um the the versions of arches that we then needed to use so there were changes there that we had to make sure we made and and obviously working on something
That’s not your own um you need to understand how um the other teams are uh what standards what practices they put in place for um getting that getting the code in there and so that it is done so in a in a in a sustained and um consistent consistent fashion so
Understanding that and starting to get used to that was um quite important um early on um and then finally kind of changing our perspective on how we how we focused our the work that we were doing so previously we were working you know solely for the internal users who were
Specifically going to going to use that and changing more towards looking how the features that we were building were going to serve a wider community that weren’t necessarily going to be you know using it for the same use cases so making sure that we design those things um in a in a
Use as useful um way as we possibly could to to Really maximize the um effectiveness of the Tool uh across the community and it’s worth touching on I think David raised earlier you know we we’ve not just done work on the code um it’s worth touching the on a lot of the
Work um H’s done is around the modeling uh and and uh specifically the data standards team in getting and sharing those schemas the structures of data that um make arches um you know really versatile in that that respect the models play a fundamental role in in Arch’s implementations um serving as really as
The backbone influencing how the implementation works so um being able to share that is great and modeling is is very tricky I’m not definitely not an expert a coder not a not a modeler there’s some you know is quite a tricky thing to get right a lot of domain
Knowledge is is um is needed to to produce them and and a lot of time as well and testing to make sure that they um you know meet standards and um are flexible but also meet all your requirements so um with arches being able to share those
Entities um this is this is this has been um really useful and we’ve we’ve tried hard to make sure that that is that shared and as it said David David said that um we have shared this um with the Arches for HR project so the models that we have running in um
The greater London historic environment of the record they are currently available in The Archers uh for HR project up on GitHub um and people can download those and use those um as they as they need or and obviously use in a in a in their own implementation ofes for
HR um and also I think the The Forum that um is provided to the community um is is key in really just having that conversation and starting conversations and is is that kind of go-to um place if you’re starting out um for my team the way we we use the Forum
Is really it’s primarily around supporting other developers you know keeping an eye out for um people who are having issues um if it’s a Windows issue then great we we may have an answer for you um or similar if it’s a feature that we’ve worked on previously then we can
But the great thing is um there are other developers who are more experienced in other areas that that that can help and and normally and normally do and and we still post um you know we still will post questions there about things that we’ve tried that we’re
Having issues with that that um we might gain gain some value asking for for for support from other elsewhere um we’ve also been involved in some roadmap proposal discussions on there um so uh looking at you know changes to permissions models looking at new UI Frameworks you know being able to
Discuss that and and have a voice and um help with a decision is is a really useful thing to be able to do and kind of add to that Community effort um and shared Community effort um we’ve also to Taken part in discussions around enhancing documentation um and also as David said
Talking about meetups um and and uh arranging things for with other developers through that through that forum and I would say if you’re if you are starting out then definitely introduce yourself on there it’s really good to be able to see um who’s there um who we’re talking to and um obviously it
Brings everyone a little bit closer so they can have some some uh great discussions on there um and then some of the community events that that have been touched on earlier in the in the um in the presentation so we we have been as a team involved in
The Arch’s UK user group meetings um some of my developers have presented their work uh on our implementations and particular features um on there other other historic England colleagues also um take part in Du presentations such as such as J K bre who um is also now the uh the current
Chair of that group and Beyond The Arches user UK user group we we have done some demonstrations we’ve um done some technical q&as and knowledge sharing with other um organizations around the UK who um who are interested who want to know a little bit more maybe was involved with um getting something
Up and running um yeah just just really being able to answer those questions that it’s quite difficult early on when you’re trying to decide what you’re going to do or or or what Solutions right for you and um yeah finally again um developer meetups you know we the
Developer Community regularly meet up um I don’t think there was one last year but um previous years we’ve done that we’ve talked about some of our implementations um and there’s another one again next year that’s that’s currently being um arranged where we can all get together show and tell the work
That we’ve been doing um and really have a discussion about the way forward and and get to know everyone so all of that’s um really important and it’s really great that um that’s something that we can we can be involved with so that’s it really that’s that’s
Kind of uh our experience today so thank you very much for having me and if you’re if you’re into it there’s our GitHub address you want to have a look at what we’ve been doing so thank you thank you so much uh David and Andy for your presentations hi again everyone
Um we’ll beginning be beginning the Q&A portion of the webinar now um I want to remind everyone that if you have a question please do enter it into the Q&A field at the bottom um of your screen we are waiting on our first question right now um and as we wait I
Wanted to just ask David and Andy if you had anything else else to add I would I would just second um Andy’s encouragement to uh introduce yourself on the Forum um we have a we’ve had a a lot of uh people in the community join the Forum who are posing questions and it’s
Really nice to know more about um someone’s work with arches and you know what what use case they have um just get to get to know them also as individuals and you know that can that can be helpful to u to also try to connect members of the community with each other
Who might have similar interests if we know more about um um you know individual users on the Forum that’s a great Point yeah I was gonna say we’ve we’ve the the the for has been great and um being able to kind of meet everyone
Uh on there is is is is really is really on seeing what other people are doing as well the more kind of um discussions I had on there you can kind of get a good breadth of um you know views on on different implementations as you said because you know sharing that
Information can obviously lead to convers ations and lead to um us being able to kind of you know use each other’s um sort of code and features so is is really useful having that there so we do have um a question from Carl Fogle and that is what is your
Rough estimate of how long it usually takes for new participants to go from showing up to making contributions and having them accepted David I don’t know if you’d want to take this one um that is a excellent question from Carl um I don’t know if if Carl’s thinking specifically of code
Contributions um that would and maybe maybe Andy would have an idea about that if it’s co contribution yeah yeah I was going to say from from my from my side of things um I I think once we had got used to um just how it worked to begin with
So that was obviously the key thing but I mean once we’ve kind of spotted the first thing that we we knew we needed to fix um it wasn’t particularly long I think you know it was probably a couple of weeks of just working out you know having conversation with people we knew
We were you know we needed to raise an issue on GitHub so we did that and and really it just led to a conversation and um people pointing Us in the direction of um how how we did it what the contribution um instructions were I think in the wiki and yeah it was
Relatively um simple to do I think there was a few little kind of gotes around some of the etica and and you know how you do particular kind of things within that particular boquest but it wasn’t it wasn’t it didn’t take too long to do all right um we have another question
Here from gayen manino says hi Andy I was just curious what you and H or historic England think works really well in Arches and what you hope could work better um oh I think I well from a developer point of view it’s great because uh um it it’s something that’s kind of I
Know it’s really it’s very flexible so I think I think it’s kind of um the fact that you’re able to drive a lot of it through modeling um really puts a lot of the the kind of the the power that within the people who are going to use
It who are trying to who have the domain knowledge and want to be able to stand up in instance to do exactly what they want they don’t necessarily have to worry too much about the application itself you know kind of standing up and getting it kind of going is is for the
Technical team but a lot of it a lot of what it does is defined by the users who want to use it so I think that um that is is is really important I mean in terms of things that could work better um I think I think kind of from my side
Of things maybe looking at um taking forward um you know improve areas where it connects with the G I have a GS background so you know moving forward in that direction and I know um that’s being looked at by a number of people in the community so um yeah kind
Of continuing to take that forward um and integrating it more um outside of of the application I think and I think it’s all moving in the right direction thank you for that Andy um we have another question here um from fatia pen hi this is fatia from Bangladesh I
Run the world heritage volunteers program here we have a volunteer base of 200 plus participants how can I engage them in the platform can we teach them to do cultural mapping with the help of the arst platform um David is there something you can touch on sure
Um I think I think one um really you’re your your um well maybe a first thing to do would be to take a look at the Arches demo site on the uh that’s available on the Arches project website to yourself get familiar with arches and then um really
For your for the sort of project it sounds like you’re thinking of a project um you would need to have an instance of our es that would be deployed for your specific project so um you know you would I think need to be need to think
About who would who would uh kind of host that inces of arches um on a you know on a physical server or on the cloud um and what kinds of data you would want to collect and then think about per misss for users terms of creating data editing data reviewing
Data and so on um and um if you go on the Arches project website uh under the documentation menu there’s a web page called implementation consideration so I would I would recommend taking a look at that um web page to get more familiar with the things you might need to consider for implementing
Arches thank you David um we have a question from Eric Cana for Andy do you think your developers feel that open- Source collaborations make their work feel more valued with more sense of purpose or do they get something else out of it in a personal sense uh yeah no definitely I think I
Think it is definitely something that they are um do take do take pride in in in doing they certainly get a um a little kick out of having a a poll request merge into into a core certainly it’s it’ll get a whoop a daily standup once that’s that’s done so yeah it’s it
I think it it is something they enjoy to do um they certainly get a thing a kick out of it and and you know as a team we it does make us um uh happy to to know that we’re giving it um giving it out for other people to use and they’ll make
You know it’ll help them and give them give them the value really so yeah it’s great all right we have a followup from Carl fogal who thanks us for um our response and was grateful that we talked about the code contribution time commitment um and was also asking about
Docs um and just general participation the Q&A um section is still open so please continue to type in your questions yeah for for Carl’s um question about docs or documents um I think uh um Eric Eric canza who I know is on the webinar is the the lead person on the
Documentation effort he would probably be the best person to answer that um so uh that might be a good question for the Forum um I’m not sure what uh the best answer for that is um just one other thing I’ll say to answer to Carl’s question is um we have had
Members of the community that contacted and say um I’d be happy to translate we have a web page called um what is Arches and translate it to a different language and uh that doesn’t take a lot of lot of um uh time uh you know spent with arches
To be able to do that that’s just a uh someone who has the the capability and the interest to do that we have another question here from gayen manino again um directed at Andy about the poll request process for developers um inquiring about thoughts on how that could be improved and maybe
Andy if you could speak to the general experience of of working with poll requests Um I mean in terms of you know the poll requests it’s not something that um yeah we necessarily found particularly hard I think maybe some uh ensuring that the kind of the context around um you know urgency or um I think some of the things we’ve been looking at recently is is
Kind of making sure that poor requests are ready for specific versions of arches um so you know just making sure that that’s highlighted in some way I think I think recently um we’ve been looking at um talking with with some of the other developers that that um as part of the
Issue when you create the issue you specify there where where you’re going to be um at leas which version you want to Target and just making sure that some of the some of the information there is up to date um but I don’t have anything kind of specific in my mind at the
Moment about how it could could be improved I think um just ensuring that it um at least it gets kind of picked up and maybe maybe some information about who to assign it to might be might be quite useful because sometimes it’s a bit of a guess potluck just pick a
Developer that that that is suggested so maybe a little bit of guidance on what that initial po request um who who that should Target possibly so uh yeah other than that I don’t have too many comments on it really thanks Andy we still have some time so please
Continue to add your questions into the Q&A field um I will say that we just recently updated on the Arches project website um a a new updated version of our faq’s page um that we highlighted recently um in our bulletin and this is a great place for other unanswered
Questions that maybe we don’t get to um today I’ll just um add since Nina mentioned the bulletin um the Arch’s team at the GCI we prepare a bulletin every um generally every around three months every quarter and um um with news from the community news on on development
Implementations and so on and um we always welcome um receiving news from from members of the community about your work and uh um I think the bulletin is a great way to share that work with others in the community or just others interested in Arches and um
So just um we would encourage people to uh to share with us for for those bulletins upcoming bulletins and um we will we expect to have the went out in either late January early February sometime around that time frame so um we’d be happy to to uh receive any news
That anyone out there might have another great place um to share for example your arches implementation or deployment um as David already mentioned is on our website on the H is using arches page um and we also include um those implementations that are on that page in our interactive arches timeline
Which is a great resource if you want to look at the history of how the Arches Community um has grown over the past 10 years so highly recommend looking at that on our website as well and one other um kind of information that we are happy to share
With the community is if um if anyone in the community has an arches related job or um bid or like requests for proposals that sort of thing we um we have a web page for for um posting those kind of things and we’re happy to share those
Things through our social media on the Forum and in our bulletins Eric Cana has um made a comment in the Q&A that we have some more guidance on collaboration and sustainable or maintainable development with arches coming out in the official documentation release for the upcoming uh version
7.5 and keep an eye out on the forum for in our social media for information about that new release we’re getting to the end of our time here on the webinar um so if you have have any last questions please input them now right I think we might have gotten
To the end of our question portion so thank you so much everyone for joining us today for this webinar and thank you to David and Andy for their great presentations um like I previously mentioned we will be putting out a recording of This webinar within a week on our um website arches
Project.org and on our YouTube channel we will send out a notification of this to everyone who registered and share the recording on our channels as well thanks again to all and we hope to see you at a future webinar on the Forum or in the many other Arch’s Community spaces that
Were mentioned today thanks so much