This second release of D8.1 “Competitive Evaluation Strategy” [Agosti et al., 2014] has a twofold goal:

• In December 2016 there will be the final tender of the PREFORMA project which is aimed at selecting the suppliers which will participate in the “Testing Phase” scheduled from January to June 2017. This deliverable defines the criteria according to which suppliers participating in this tender will be evaluated and compared in order to determine which of them will actually proceed to the “Testing Phase”.
• The “Testing Phase” will evaluate the tool produced by the suppliers on real experimental collections in order to assess their overall quality for conformance checking. This deliverable defines the methodologies and protocols which will be used in this phase to assess the suppliers’ tools.

The document is organized as follows: Section 2 describes the new instantiation of the “PREFORMA Evaluation Matrix” tailored for evaluating the access to the “Testing Phase”; Section 3 introduces the procedures according to which the tender in December 2016 will be managed; Section 4 introduces the framework which will be adopted to evaluate suppliers’ tools during the “Testing Phase”; Section 5 details, for each media type targeted by PREFORMA, the testing classes which will be used; Section 6 describes the practical workflow which will be followed to operate the “Testing Phase”.

This deliverable describes the initial version of the sustainability and exploitation plan of PREFORMA, including a preliminary impact assessment conducted through an analysis of the level of activity generated in the community, of the test cases carried out so far and of the results of a survey circulated to the memory institutions participating to the project, both as partners and as associate partners within the network of common interest.

The following communities have been considered in relation to their expected engagement in exploiting the PREFORMA applications:

• the open-source community of researchers and developers interested in contributing to the code;
• memory institutions willing to integrate the PREFORMA software in their infrastructure;
• the community of enterprises interested in PREFORMA tools and in developing services around them (first of all the suppliers working in the project);
• the standardization bodies looking for feedback on how to improve and advance the specifications of the standard file formats.

The Experience Workshop took place Berlin on 23 November 2016, in connection with the second Prototype Demonstration. The PREFORMA partners shared their experiences of working with suppliers under R&D service agreements with other memory institutions.

The morning session focused on use cases for conformance checkers from memory institutions, while the afternoon explored the PREFORMA challenge with an overview of the upcoming testing phase. This was followed by presentations from the three suppliers who develop the conformance checkers.

All presentation slides and more photos from the workshop are available at: http://experienceworkshop.PREFORMA-project.eu/programme/.

Deliverable D3.4 reports on the Open Source Workshop that was based on the availability of the first prototype on the Open Source Portal and the results of the first demonstration organised by the suppliers.

The workshop was organised by the PREFORMA project on 7 April 2016 in Stockholm and was hosted by Kungliga Biblioteket. The overall structure for the full day workshop was to devote the morning session to presentations and the afternoon session to interaction and discussion amongst workshop participants. To address the fundamental community aspects of open source in the archival domain and in memory institutions involved in (or planning) digital preservation initiatives, the PREFORMA team invited Peter Bubestinger as a keynote speaker. To address the licensing aspects of open source, the PREFORMA team invited Dr. Till Jaeger as a keynote speaker.

The aim for the morning session was to convey an overview of the PREFORMA project and insights concerning key challenges for successful open source development as perceived by the two keynote speakers. The aim for the afternoon session was to report on development efforts undertaken by PREFORMA suppliers, with highlights on open source tools being developed, and to offer suppliers an opportunity for exhibiting their tools to workshop participants. A further goal during the afternoon was to further stimulate interaction and dialogue between suppliers’ representatives and other workshop participants.

The workshop facilitated a unique opportunity for attendees to raise different issues and challenges of specific interest with suppliers’ representatives, PREFORMA partners’ representatives, the invited speakers, and other workshop participants. During discussions, several attendees established valuable contacts and networking amongst participants was highly appreciated. For the suppliers, the interactive networking session gave many opportunities for disseminating and communicating their efforts to the broader communities, including potential adopters of open source software developed in PREFORMA.