[Dspace-general] DSpace development priorities: starting a discussion

[Mark H. Wood]

Some things to keep in mind:

o  There is no commercial or employment relationship between end-users
   and developers here.  Anybody who wants something done must
   accomplish it either by his own (or his organization's) labor, or
   by moral suasion -- appealing to the value of improving the
   commons, or the good feeling that comes from having done something
   well.

   The good news is that, *because* there is no mechanism of
   compulsion, moral suasion works tolerably well in such situaions.

o  On the other hand, there is most definitely an employment
   relationship between the developer and his own institution.  If I
   want to work on some aspect of DSpace, I have to convince my
   supervisor that the work will benefit the institution sufficiently
   to account for the cost of my time.  It's difficult, but not
   impossible, to sell intangible benefits like building up the
   commons, but it is much easier to sell features that we need
   ourselves.  The result is that the needs of one's own institution
   *usually* come first.

o  Just expounding a need of your institution may cause someone
   elsewhere to realize, "hey, we could use that too -- and we have
   the resources to build it."  So we do all need to talk about our
   needs and wishes, even if we can't realize them ourselves.

o  Code is not all there is.  If your institution can't create code,
   could it contribute documentation or user-interface design?  Could
   you volunteer to monitor a tracker and provide short monthly
   postings on item turnover, or moderate a task force, or maintain a
   most-popular-request list?

o  One of the most effective ways to poison a community project is to
   try to manage contributors as if you have some authority over them.
   They know better.  Any community member (coder or not) who feels
   that his contributions are unappreciated has *nothing to lose* by
   ceasing to contribute, because the only reward for contribution is
   already denied him.  Because the project is held in common, he can
   still work on it for those who *do* reward him.


And a few questions:

On Thu, Aug 07, 2008 at 03:02:25PM +0200, Christophe Dupriez wrote:
> 1) Apply the 80/20 rule: Create an immediatley applicable DSpace package
> which answers to 80% of the needs of 80% of the smaller institutions
> which would be happy to not hire any developer (and keep their money to
> hire a very good application manager) to have an enthusiastic result
> **that the DSpace foundation would guarantee to sustain on the long
> term, always providing an easy upgrade path from one version to the next**

Has this not already been done?  How do we know?  What remains to be
done in order to satisfy the 80%?

> 2) The sponsors should be institutions gathering to provide resources
> (money, people, organisation skills) to obtain this result in a
> reasonable time frame (18 months). The Foundation would coordinate this
> committe, animate the process with a democratic "1 participating
> institution = 1 vote" decision process

Doesn't this just entrench the plutocracy?  Those lacking resources to
support development have no vote.  Did I misunderstand?


And some suggested reading:

  _The Cathedral and the Bazaar_, by Eric S. Raymond.

  An exploration of the economics, psychology, and sociology of
  development by community.  If you want to know how to motivate
  participants in a project like DSpace, or just understand why some
  of them behave so oddly, this is a good place to start.

-- 
Mark H. Wood, Lead System Programmer   mwood at IUPUI.Edu
Typically when a software vendor says that a product is "intuitive" he
means the exact opposite.

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