[Dspace-general] [Dspace-tech] Development goals

[Mark Diggory]

On Nov 16, 2007, at 3:40 AM, Christophe Dupriez wrote:

> Dear Michele (copy to the community),
>
> May be I am basically wrong seing DSpace as a community of practice  
> making a tool to promote the dissemination of the "good" Open  
> Repositories practices.

No. I think your right on in this regard, but just not "one tool",  
many tools that work collaboratively. Yet, also to be a good  
participant in a larger community of existing tools and platforms.

> If I understand correctly your plans, DSpace is primarily a  
> community of developpers where users requirements are tackled  
> inside individual institutions and "mostly technical" problems are  
> shared outside. I am sorry that my "dream" is different but I will  
> play the "real game" ! I will follow the Claudia Juergen's advice:  
> "Small contributions are beautiful".

I think we need to "be careful" about these definitions.  The DSpace  
Community is a reflection of what its members need and want in an  
organization of users, managers and developers around the DSpace  
platform.  The most salient roadblock to increasing the transmission  
of community enhancements into the codebase is that  DSpace was  
basically a monolithic platform with a centralized build process. A  
significant bottleneck existed (and may still exist until we have a  
SCM and Issue tracking system that is scalable in terms of Access  
control) in that the "commiters" managing the process of reviewing  
and getting changes into the codebase supplied by the community as  
"patches".

The developers who are "commiters" are so because they want to  
participate more intimately with the future direction of DSpace.  The  
previous viewpoint that "commiters" were basically "servants" or  
"gate-keepers" to the contributor community is both ill-fitting and  
unrealistic because a large number of the "commiters" are actually  
emeritus in their behavior and not very active, leaving much of the  
work in the role of "gate-keeper" actually to the newly elected  
commiters.  Thus the "paradox" and the "bottleneck".  The actual and  
ideal "maintainers", "shepherds" or "stewards" of the community are  
not on the continuum of "commiter vs. contributor", but actually on  
the continuum of "active vs. inactive"!  We need a better process for  
shifting the dial to the "active" side.

>
> To be constructive and pragmatic, my main technical challenge  
> remains: adding "thesaurus based" query expansion to DSpace to be  
> able to mimic PubMed searches exhaustivity and precision in DSpace  
> (we now have 75 thousands documents in our internal repository.  
> MeSH is 30 thousands subjects headings). I will keep focused on this.

You should be more aggressive in participating "in the community" on  
something like this,  prod the community to get more participation,  
and be flexible about the final outcome.  I think you'll find that  
there are other developers in the community with the same interest.   
It would behoove you and them to get out of the woodwork and have  
real transparent conversations together on the community lists (hint  
hint, nudge nudge, Richard Rodgers).

Cheers,
Mark

~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Mark R. Diggory - DSpace Systems Manager
MIT Libraries, Systems and Technology Services
Massachusetts Institute of Technology


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