Page History

...

Summary (Very Rough)

...

Over the last few years, the Steering Group along with various strategic working groups have validated the following vision statements which describe the goals of the DSpace open source product:

...

These five statements lead us to a proposed possible "value proposition" for the DSpace platform (DRAFT)

DSpace is a turn-key web application for maintaining, disseminating and promoting the digital resources or digital output of an organization and its members.

Assumptions

It is worth being aware that several assumptions are made in the drafting of this strategic plan for technology:

• We do NOT plan to rewrite DSpace from scratch, for the following reasons:
  • We have a highly active (and global) development community on the existing platform. We are averaging 50+ contributors in recent major releases. We also have a very active and healthy set of service providers.
  • A complete rewrite would require significant funding / and centralized resources, neither of which are currently available. There also seem to be few (if any) grant opportunities to rebuild existing, established platforms.
  • A complete rewrite is very risky in the open source world. While in some cases it can succeed, it also can run the risk of fragmenting or fracturing a user community or developer community.
• We ARE aiming for a potentially substantial leap forward in user experience / web user interface.
  • We've heard the feedback that neither of the two UIs (JSPUI or XMLUI) provides an optimal user or administrative experience. So, a UI User Interface rewrite or major refactoring would be "on the table".
• The below actions and goals are ambitious, but we believe they are achievable provided that 1) we
  
  1. We can also achieve our Sustainability goal of increasing project revenue to hire a Product Manager, and
  2) institutional
  2. Institutional stakeholders are willing to commit developers to spend time working on organized development sprints under the direction of the DSpace Technical Lead to achieve the deliverables. 

Based on this proposed value proposition and assumptions, the Steering Group recommends the following actions corresponding to each goal:

...

To be "lean", the DSpace technology platform should avoid duplicative functionality except where necessary to meet use cases or achieve "flexibility" goals.  Where unnecessary duplicative functionality already exists, the technology team should choose a "best option" solution, or propose building a new solution when a "best option" does not exist.

...

Goal 4: DSpace will be designed in such a way that it can be easily/quickly configured to integrate with new & future tools/services in the larger digital scholarship "ecosystem"

Assigned: Bram Luyten

In order to continue to play a key role in the larger digital scholarship "ecosystem", DSpace must provide ways to both share and consume data/content from external services. We should strive to make all information in DSpace "shareable", and also ease the process of adding information to DSpace by providing Administrators with tools to consume data from other locations.

DSpace should To provide easy and out of the box integration aspects with external services in the following areas:

...

To integrate with parallel projects and initiatives (fedora, hydra, islandora) we first need to pin down the use cases of what those integrations will bring to DSpace, or what these will bring to the other platforms. They currently do not fit immediately in any of these five areas.More examples are in the comment below, but those are probably already too detailed for this page and should end up in the technology document.

Goal 5: DSpace will support low-cost, hosted solutions and deployments (by featuring an easy, "just works" setup)

...