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Evolution of DSpace Developer Community: Fostering Collaboration and Innovation

Explore the growth and challenges of the DSpace developer community. Learn about current development models, successes, and needed improvements to ensure the success of DSpace technology. Discover key needs, including community education, communication, and fostering collaboration to propel the platform forward.

jchambers
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Evolution of DSpace Developer Community: Fostering Collaboration and Innovation

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  1. DSpace developer community Dr. Robert Tansley Digital Media Systems Dept, HP Labs

  2. DSpace developer community • Maintains and develops DSpace technology • All other concerns are enabled by this • It’s a virtuous circle – users and developers! • Success of DSpace and those using it depends on success of developer community

  3. Developer responsibilities

  4. Development models

  5. Current development model

  6. What this covers

  7. Where we need to get to

  8. Successes of current model • Vibrant technical support • >650 list members, 170 posts/month • Vast majority of improvements in latest DSpace version came from outside HP/MIT • User interface growing to meet demands • Multi-lingual, accessible, new features • Community increasingly involved in bug fixing etc.

  9. Needs for an improved model • Direction • What is DSpace? Academia? Publishing/access? Preservation? • Even small contributions can impact DSpace’s mission and scope • E.g. ‘metadata only’ items • Committers left to decide path • “Top down” steering impossible, no way to control community development resources • Resources • For documentation, architecture, etc. etc.

  10. Needs for an improved model • Community education, coordination • People do not consult dev community before undertaking developments. Frustration if contribution turns out to be unsuitable • Contributions often ‘hurled over the fence’ when contributor has no more resources to work on it (e.g. near end of funded project); committers have to accept ‘as is’ and undertake any required refactoring, documentation etc., or reject, resulting in frustration and wasted work • How to proceed if funded project deliverables conflict with platform/community needs/consensus?

  11. Where we need to get to

  12. DSpace needs to evolveKeep up with our own success! • Code modularity • Better suit distributed development, control scope • Repository architecture • Meet preservation, access, content requirements better • Robust, enterprise-scale system • Scale to massive quantities of data and users • A tough job for the current developers who all have full time day jobs! • Need focussed development teams/projects

  13. Key Needs • Motivated resources focussed on release mgmt, QA, bug fixing, documentation • Focussed, accountable teams/projects/efforts to move platform architecture forward • Need relevant expertise in domain and enterprise systems architecture • Need community consensus/support/representation, but also fast decision-making process • Community education and communication • “Share early, share often” is not just an ideal; it is fundamental to making distributed open source development work

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