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DSpace developer community. Dr. Robert Tansley Digital Media Systems Dept, HP Labs. DSpace developer community. Maintains and develops DSpace technology All other concerns are enabled by this It’s a virtuous circle – users and developers!
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DSpace developer community Dr. Robert Tansley Digital Media Systems Dept, HP Labs
DSpace developer community • Maintains and develops DSpace technology • All other concerns are enabled by this • It’s a virtuous circle – users and developers! • Success of DSpace and those using it depends on success of developer community
Successes of current model • Vibrant technical support • >650 list members, 170 posts/month • Vast majority of improvements in latest DSpace version came from outside HP/MIT • User interface growing to meet demands • Multi-lingual, accessible, new features • Community increasingly involved in bug fixing etc.
Needs for an improved model • Direction • What is DSpace? Academia? Publishing/access? Preservation? • Even small contributions can impact DSpace’s mission and scope • E.g. ‘metadata only’ items • Committers left to decide path • “Top down” steering impossible, no way to control community development resources • Resources • For documentation, architecture, etc. etc.
Needs for an improved model • Community education, coordination • People do not consult dev community before undertaking developments. Frustration if contribution turns out to be unsuitable • Contributions often ‘hurled over the fence’ when contributor has no more resources to work on it (e.g. near end of funded project); committers have to accept ‘as is’ and undertake any required refactoring, documentation etc., or reject, resulting in frustration and wasted work • How to proceed if funded project deliverables conflict with platform/community needs/consensus?
DSpace needs to evolveKeep up with our own success! • Code modularity • Better suit distributed development, control scope • Repository architecture • Meet preservation, access, content requirements better • Robust, enterprise-scale system • Scale to massive quantities of data and users • A tough job for the current developers who all have full time day jobs! • Need focussed development teams/projects
Key Needs • Motivated resources focussed on release mgmt, QA, bug fixing, documentation • Focussed, accountable teams/projects/efforts to move platform architecture forward • Need relevant expertise in domain and enterprise systems architecture • Need community consensus/support/representation, but also fast decision-making process • Community education and communication • “Share early, share often” is not just an ideal; it is fundamental to making distributed open source development work