Paul Caton and Brian Maher: After the grant
Channel: Society of Research Software Engineering
Date: 2023-01-19

A talk from the Management parallel session at RSECon2022.

Full title: After the grant: dealing with digital resources and legacy software beyond the funded period

Details: https://virtual.oxfordabstracts.com/#/event/3101/submission/107
Slides: https://d3ijlhudpq9yjw.cloudfront.net/c6e2d94d-46ca-4682-b5eb-88fb641feea8.pptx

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Abstract: Online resources – especially complex public-facing websites – will over time lose functionality and become increasingly at risk unless continually maintained and updated. For many years creators and funders of digital resources in the humanities failed to anticipate and provide for the real costs of sustaining those resources over a lifecycle which may extend for years beyond the grant-funded period. In recent years, the result of this short-sighted approach has become obvious: numerous legacy applications - built with public money - becoming unsustainable with no further funding available to address the issues.  

King’s Digital Lab has felt this problem acutely. At our inception in 2015 we inherited ~100 research projects [http://www.digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/13/1/000411/000411.html], some dating back as far as the late 1990s/early 2000s. These were developed by various developers using a mix of technologies and deployed across a range of operating systems. Now we have rationalized our legacy estate [https://kdl.kcl.ac.uk/our-work/archiving-sustainability/] and 100% of what we run is fully supported. Collaboratively the KDL team -comprising a wide range of RSE roles - has developed a five-step strategy to follow when a resource we are hosting becomes unsustainable in its current form.  

1. Discover and enumerate components 
2. Invite participation 
3. Align and consolidate technologies 
4. Redefine minimum viable product 
5. Agree upon, formalize, and document roadmap to end-of-life  

We describe these five steps, including the role types involved, the actions taken, risks incurred and their mitigations, and the lessons which can be applied to ongoing practice to improve the sustainability of future legacy resources.

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0:00 Speaker introduction
0:20 Talk
20:00 Q&A