[Dspace-general] Scope of DSpace

[MacKenzie Smith]

At 10:35 AM 1/25/2006 +0100, Richard Jones wrote:
>Anyway, I have a crazy idea with regard to modularising the DSpace code 
>base.  It's maybe a bit extreme in terms of organisation, but here it 
>is:  Would it be sensible/useful to organise at some point a "Developer 
>Camp", where those of us who wanted to could get together for anything up 
>to a week at a host institution with a pile of computers and as much of 
>our own code as we want to bring and actually physically start to pull the 
>codebase appart into a series of modules?

Not crazy, this is on the agenda to try to do this year, but it's a long 
agenda with many moving parts.

Here's the plan:
-- we're having the discussion with an advisory board in late March about 
"community governance and resource planning"
-- that will lead to some direction/decisions about whether to generate 
more resources (i.e. people and/or money) to do things like QA, release 
management, and organizing/running developers meetings so we can make 
faster progress on these critical questions

The advisory board will consider both the what and the how... what central 
support and/or infrastructure does this community need to thrive, if any, 
and how should we pay for that. I'm pretty optimistic that the outcome 
(hopefully with input from the rest of the DSpace community) will allow us 
to move ahead with things like annual user group meetings in relevant 
geographic areas, more predictable release planning, and developer forums 
on a regular basis.

Until then, I believe you're right -- having these discussions online is 
useful, but it's too hard to come to closure and we need more resources 
(mainly people's time) to get beyond this stage.

MacKenzie



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