[Dspace-general] DSpace call for contributors

[MacKenzie Smith]

Call for DSpace Technical Contributors

The recent DSpace user group meeting at MIT provided an excellent showcase 
of the large and growing body of DSpace development, and the growing number 
of talented individuals who are working to improve and expand the platform. 
Presenters shared their DSpace-related developments for e-theses, 
publishing, learning object repositories, user interface design and much 
more. How can the people doing this work contribute their efforts back to 
the DSpace platform for the common benefit of the user community?

DSpace is an open source system, and as such is freely available for any 
organization or individual to use, customize, and improve. But in order for 
DSpace to remain a useful system and to continue to improve, as we know it 
must, we need to build a community of developers beyond the original HP and 
MIT teams. The goal of establishing a wider DSpace developer community is 
to encourage and support  community-driven development, where those who use 
the platform also shape its evolution, both in terms of framing functional 
requirements and high-level architecture, and also by contributing 
programming, testing, documentation and other resources to the project.

This is a call for those who have worked with DSpace to join this effort 
and get involved! While many organizational details remain to be worked 
out, a consensus emerged at the user group meeting that DSpace should 
embrace the open source model of collective ownership of the platform. This 
will require participation from DSpace users on many levels, both technical 
and functional.

To get all this going, a new mailing list 
'dspace-devel at lists.sorceforge.net' has been established as the forum for 
technical contributors to talk about the issues, and a tool such as 
Bugzilla will be activated for posting patches and other code 
contributions. The dspace-tech mailing list at Sourceforge will continue to 
be used for technical questions and discussions about using DSpace.

In the coming months, we also hope to establish better and more logical 
communication channels, including email lists, expanded use of forums and 
wikis (such as are found at the DSpace Scoop site), with the aim of 
bringing greater visibility and transparency to the development process.

So please GET INVOLVED. The future of the DSpace platform depends on the 
involvement of everyone from the community to make it work for all of us. 
DSpace is what *we* make it. To GET INVOLVED TODAY, subscribe to the new 
dspace-devel list and volunteer your talents in one or more functional 
areas: for example to contribute programming, testing, documentation, 
bug-fixing, etc. You can subscribe and just post what youre working on its 
helpful for people to know whos already working on what. As a volunteer 
effort, the scope and duration of your involvement is entirely UP TO YOU 
there are no minimum skills or time commitments or other constraints and 
there are lots of ways to contribute. The success of DSpace will depend in 
large measure on building this team of contributors: please join in!



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