A Year in the Life of DSpace
Stuart Lewis's presentation focused on the unique DSpace process that interweaves software development, a diverse global community, issues of sustainability and governance and developing a common vision.
After twelve years DSpace is continuing to evolve with 59 developers from many countries. Each release of DSpace offers the community new features gathered from many contributors. Using Git hub unlocked code contributions from a large number of committers.
Installations of DSpace continuesto grow--almost at 1600. Only 1/5 of the DSpace installations are in North America while that is where most DSpace sponsors are. Developing strategies for increasing DSpace sponsorship outside of North America is a key task for the newly-formed DSpace Steering Group.
He believes that hosted DSpace (DSpaceDirect) is a valuable service for this community.
Recently the DSpace community was asked to participate in a DSpace Vision survey to try and come up with a unified vision about how DSpace might develop in the future. Early ideas include:
1. A focus on modern IR use case
2. Software should be lean and agile
3. Core software functions should be extendable
4. Should be configurable to interoperate and support digital scholareship as it evolves
5. Low-cost hosted solutions and deployments should be encouraged
A discussion of the community vision survey results were scheduled for 3/12. Next steps include developing a roadmap, engaging the community, and development/deployment
