The Spring Hackathon will be our biggest online hack event to date! This is an opportunity to learn some new skills as well as make a meaningful contribution to open source digital preservation software.

Our hackathon is open to everyone! We have split the event into three streams with a variety of tasks, so everyone should be able to find something they can work on given the time, knowledge, and skills available to them. We are very grateful for whatever time you can volunteer.

Dates

Starting on Monday 27 April, there will be staggered kick-off calls for each stream:

• Development (Monday 27 April, 15:00 CEST)
• Documentation (Monday 4 May, 15:00 CEST)
• Research (Monday 11 May, 15:00 CEST)

Streams

Development
The development stream will focus primarily on JHOVE. Tasks will include configuration fixes, improving the PDF module, overhauling the command line interface code base, reviewing behaviour for module selection, and reviewing the implication of the byte stream module. We also welcome contributions in the form of general code maintenance and quality assurance.

Documentation
Contributors can also take on documentation tasks including translating website and module documentation, and creating user guides. We are also looking for participants to help define key terms and ensure consistent use of terms throughout documentation and error messages.

Research
This stream will focus on the future of our products. Tasks will include gap analysis of modules (e.g. comparing the JHOVE TIFF module to DPF Manager, or the JHOVE PDF module to veraPDF) or identifying requirements for a set of common behaviours for validating archive formats.

Contributors can also help with a review of the standards used by JHOVE. Are they the most recent versions? What’s happening in standards development and how can we prepare for these changes?

How will it work?

We are running online check in calls over the course of the Hackathon:

• Thursday 30 April, 15:00 CEST
• Thursday 7 May, 15:00 CEST
• Thursday 14 May, 15:00 CEST
• Thursday 21 May, 15:00 CEST 

We will be using GitHub comments and a Slack channel to track progress. Both will be visible to everyone to help people to see what others are working on and provide feedback and review.

Registration

Please register here. This does not commit you to participating, but it will help us estimate how many people to expect and to plan for the check in-calls. We will also be able to invite you to our slack channel and keep you updated with the event progress.

Please share this event with your friends and colleagues! We’ll be using the hashtag #OPFSpringHackathon