[Dspace-general] Announcement: new DSpace Federation Committers Group formed

[MacKenzie Smith]

Announcing the Creation of the DSpace Federation Committers Group

At the recent DSpace user group meeting there was consensus that it's time 
to expand the group of developers who are authorized to make changes to the 
DSpace software, usually known as "committers" since they can "commit" 
changes to the code repository. These are the people who have ultimate 
responsibility for the shape of the DSpace software, its architecture and 
design going forward, and they can apply code changes contributed by the 
larger DSpace development community to the open source platform. They will 
develop a process by which all contributors can submit code to DSpace, and 
will be responsible for the composition of the committers group itself - 
recruiting new members to join over time.

Following the example of other well-known, successful open source projects, 
DSpace is now recruiting a group of individuals to become committers. We 
are starting with a small number of initial committers, drawn from the 
group of people already working on DSpace, and including people outside the 
original HP-MIT team, who have kindly volunteered their services to help 
get things going. This 'seed group' of committers will soon be expanded to 
include others according to criteria that they collectively define. The 
initial five members are:

Robert Tansley, HP
Richard Rodgers, MIT
Jim Downing, Cambridge University
Richard Jones, University of Edinburgh
Ralph LeVan, OCLC

Many thanks to Jim, Richard, and Ralph for offering their help!  We hope 
that others who have done work on DSpace will soon join them.

The committer group will soon be issuing an announcement of their own about 
how you can get involved, either by contributing your code to the project 
or by becoming a committer yourself. Becoming a DSpace committer does not 
necessarily imply that you will submit your own code to DSpace (although we 
hope you will!) but more importantly that you will be responsible for 
helping to maintain the integrity of the codebase as contributions are 
added from everyone, including the MIT and HP developers. The committer 
group will be charged with figuring out how contributions can be made to 
the DSpace open source software while not requiring copyright transfer from 
the originating institution unless and until such time as a new 
organization assumes IP management for the system. All contributions will, 
of course, be part of the open source software under the current BSD 
license and so available to all DSpace users.

We're very excited by this new phase of DSpace, and we believe that it will 
help accelerate the platform's evolution into a stable, flexible system 
that solves a variety of needs for digital repositories. Stay tuned for 
more news about this group in the coming weeks,


MacKenzie


MacKenzie Smith
Associate Director for Technology
MIT Libraries
Building 14S-308
77 Massachusetts Avenue
Cambridge, MA  02139
(617)253-8184
kenzie at mit.edu