OPEN DIALOGUE

PREFORMA aims to ensure the establishment of a process of open dialogue between memory institutions and technology providers in order to contribute to the development of requirements and specifications of the tender. The PREFORMA partners will then define the functional requirements of the tender based on the outcome of the open dialogue.

This process, which will lead up to the publication of the tender in May 2014, includes:

​The establishment of a task force composed by partners’ representatives that will produce papers for discussion, shared online and/or within the mailing list, to build consensus on the preservation formats that will be tested by the PREFORMA toolset.

​An open consultation about the tender to get an understanding of the needs of the individual memory institutions regarding conformance checking. This includes:

​a series of open questions, posed to the participants to the physical events organised by PREFORMA, about the way memory institutions acquire digital objects, their policy on receiving and preserving digital objects, the resources at their disposal and the digital objects they might be able to share with the PREFORMA partners for training and testing;

​interviews to memory institutions, both partners of the PREFORMA project and other institutions who express their interest to participate to this investigation, to discuss the usage scenario for the conformance checker which will be developed for the single institutions. All the collected usage scenarios will be merged into one joint user model, integrating all individual requirements in a concise set of generic use cases.

​The organisation of a workshop in Brussels on the 5th of March 2014 targeted at the memory institutions. This provided the opportunity for them to agree on the functional requirements and technical specifications of the reference implementation tools to be developed in PREFORMA.

​The organisation of a public Information Day event in Brussels on the 4th of April 2014 to facilitate engagement and consultation with potential suppliers and to present the PREFORMA call for tender.

​The organisation of a networking session at the EGI Community Forum in Helsinki on the 21st of May 2014 as an additional opportunity to present the PREFORMA call for tender and to collect feedback.

The progress and the outcomes of this process are continuously updated in a dedicated living webpage on the PREFORMA blog.

Contact us at info@preforma-project.eu to obtain more information on the procurement or with specific queries. We will make sure that your requests are forwarded to all the relevant parties and that they will be taken into account in the design of the tender functional requirements and technical specification.