[Dspace-general] DSpace user group meeting follow-up

[MacKenzie Smith]

Dear all,

Since many of you were unable to attend the recent DSpace User Group 
meeting at the University of Cambridge, UK, I am sending a brief summary to 
this list. And for more detail please see the wiki page that Rob Tansley 
set up last week (http://wiki.dspace.org/UserGroupMeetingSummary2005). For 
those who were there, feel free to add anything we've missed!

-- I won't replay the many excellent presentations since they will be 
posted soon to the conference programme page at Cambridge.
-- Rob has already summarized the various Birds of a Feather sessions from 
the first day
-- Cliff Lynch's excellent closing keynote talk was informative and 
inspirational, but not reproducible in summary

Some other conclusions

-- Communications
         -- MIT should close down the current set of Special Interest Group 
listservs (dspace-IR, dspace-theses, dspace-publishing, dspace-LOR, 
dspace-ERM, dspace-datasets, dspace-preservation) since they are not 
serving their intended purpose, but we will keep the dspace-general list 
and the two technical mailing lists on 
<http://wiki.dspace.org/SourceForge>SourceForge (dspace-tech and 
dspace-devel) [NOTE -- expect this to happen soon if I don't hear strong 
objections!]
         -- MIT and other institutions will support specialized, topical 
mailing lists of specific technical topics for defined periods of time, as 
needed (for example, to continue a particularly lively BOF discussion from 
the user group meeting)
         -- MIT will work on a plan to overhaul the current DSpace 
Federation website to represent all the stakeholders in the community, with 
community input and assistance
         -- we should add some new sections to the wiki, e.g. for DSpace 
systems administrators and/or other specialized types of developers or users
         -- The user group meetings are very valuable to the community, so 
we should plan the user group meetings for 2006 and beyond in different 
parts of the world so that DSpace developers/users can attend meetings 
closer to their home at least once in awhile (e.g. alternate between North 
American venues and European, South American, Asian, and other venues). 
Ideally there would be two user group meetings per year, but since they are 
sponsored and organized by volunteers that may not prove practical
         -- consider starting a DSpace newsletter to be mailed to 
subscribers or posted on the website with contributions from community members

-- Planning
         -- with the committer group, create a more detailed development 
Road Map so that the community can volunteer to help with the many parts of 
it. We can convene a group of technical architects from the community (and 
possibly beyond) to help with that, and this should lead to detailed 
specifications that developers can pick up and help with as their time permits
         -- the community needs to develop a DSpace Services Framework that 
will help us define a Service Oriented Architecture for future releases of 
the system. Understanding what Services (in the technical sense of the 
word) DSpace should support relative to other systems, other community, and 
other service models (in the non-technical sense) will be critical for our 
ability to define the role of DSpace in our various local communities and 
focus our collective efforts to best advantage
         -- over the past year the DSpace community has developed a solid 
working model for collective technical development and governance of the 
code. Now it's time to come up with a governance model for the community as 
a whole that represents all the stakeholders and their goals for the 
system. Julie Walker from MIT has developed a brief proposal for a process 
that will help us do that, starting with an interim steering committee who 
will advise us on the best course of action for our particular community. 
That committee will be formed over the summer and will be asked to produce 
a report on a recommended DSpace governance model which we can then 
implement over the next year. The DSpace governance process will *not* 
replace the committers as the Keepers of the Code, but will consider other 
aspects of community management such as communications, outreach and 
advocacy, legal and regulatory issues, and sustainability in the business 
sense (i.e. all the stuff that MIT and HP do now, and which we will 
continue to help with, but should now be broadened beyond two organizations).

This is not an exhaustive or objective summary... it's what I took away 
from the meeting and what we will focus on for next year aside from 
technical developments. If you'd like to add anything to this please post 
to the list or to the wiki -- we'd welcome your comments!

Best wishes,


MacKenzie Smith
Associate Director for Technology
MIT Libraries
Building E25-131d
77 Massachusetts Avenue
Cambridge, MA  02139
(617)253-8184
kenzie at mit.edu