Update on the "Rebuild LibriVox" Project

[hugh]

Dear All,

We are now 6 months into the Mellon-funded project, to revamp the LibriVox tech infrastructure. We have a few people paid to work on the project: Jeff Madsen (developer), Artom Lifshitz (system administrator), and Valerie Bock (project manager). To date, they have together logged 441 hours, or about 44% of paid hours budgeted for this project.

Hours Breakdown:
* System Administration: 32
* Development: 323
* Project Management: 86

We will add a fourth paid staffer this month: Sonia of Nudge Design, who will be working on the redesign of the website.

Additionally, volunteers Jo Smallheer, Cori Samuel and Hugh McGuire have been working behind the scenes to guide the project, with help and support from a host of other volunteers and admins.

In the last three months we have:

* Migrated the existing system to new servers at the Internet Archive. (Special thanks to Jo Smallheer, who spearheaded the testing effort, working closely with Artom Lifshitz, our system administrator)
* Researched and designed a new categorization system, which we believe best suits the Librivox collection (thanks to Cori Samuel for taking that project on)
* Developed the tech foundation for a smoother backend system for project management and cataloging
* Started testing the (prototype) project management/cataloging system

In the weeks ahead we will be:

* Updating the Wiki, Wordpress, and Forum Software
* Completing and rolling-out a fully functional version of the new project management/cataloging system for wider testing
* Developing and applying a new website design
* Developing the API’s for the Open Catalog improvements

Overall this year long project is, at its halfway point, currently under budget and running ahead of schedule.

Thanks again to everyone who has been working diligently to make this project happen. Special thanks to the Internet Archive, and of course the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation for making this project possible.

[gmcmillan007]

It would be good if someone could provide us a further progress update since December.

Thanks,
Graham

[TriciaG]

Since no one has responded, I'll give an unofficial, "I'm not in the loop on everything" report.

The paid staff have logged over 1000 hours of work. I don't have a breakdown on how much is development, web design, administration, etc.

Since the last update, we have:
* Updated the Wiki, Wordpress, and Forum Software
* Imported and cleaned up the author/translator records and language information, and finalized genres for the new project management/cataloging system
* Gotten a LOT of development work done on the project management/cataloging system
* Made a lot of progress on the web site design

Currently we are working on:

* Testing the project management/cataloging system, finding and squashing bugs. We're deep in the throes of this at the moment.
* Getting feedback from the admins on the new website design.

I don't know what the status is on the API stuff.

Hope this helps!

[WoollyBee]

Thanks Tricia!

[hallejk]

I'm sure this topic has already been discussed, but what would it look like to change to a different forum software? You could still use the cataloging and Wordpress systems the same right? As for MWs are they just HTML code that could be copied into another program or would they have to be re-written completely?

[annise]

I'm not sure you will get much of an answer - particularly as everyone who might be able to give a definite one is flat out on the new software - and would probably scream and pull their hair out at the very idea at this point of time.
The MW is just coding - which probably theoretically just drop in to something else. However in my experience anytime anyone says something like that it doesn't work even with upgrades especially if you are doing something not normally done - and ours is certainly not a normal use.

Anne

just to make something clear - the forum software is not part of the Mellon Grant changes

[Cori]

Let me do what I can, having been involved a little in the recent forum update. Yes, the website, catalogue and wiki could stay the same. Yes, MWs are an added feature that we could include in any non-proprietary software. There is a little magic that connects forum usernames to MW / catalogue names, so that would need to be updated by a developer and tested ... perhaps a few days paid work and a week unpaid testing.

For the forum software itself -- it took some paid days of our sys admin's time, plus several days of testing by MCs just to do the recent upgrade of our existing forum. In order to make a change to the base software, we'd need to research alternatives, noting that we need an open source / free option because we have no budget for purchasing or licencing commercial software. We'd need to migrate 8 years'worth of posts to that new system, retaining our current forum structure (because it would be a shame to lose our collective history.) We'd need perhaps double the amount of paid time and at least triple the volunteer time mentioned above in testing the migration before taking it from a test environment to live.

Then the people who've produced "how to" videos which relate to the forums would need to rerecord all of them so they were up to date. And finally forum users would need to relearn how to do what they need to do here. I wouldn't underestimate the size of that last task, since for many LibriVoxers this is the first (or main) forum they've used.


In informal browsing, I've not seen another forum software that I think's lightyears better, for the price, scale of use and feature set. I don't think there's major functionality we're missing, or that our known glitches like flaky email-alerts, are worth the effort and cost of upheaval. Am I missing something?