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• 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 / 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 rewrite or major refactoring would be "on the table".
• The below actions and goals are ambitious, but we believe they are achievable provided that we can also achieve our Sustainability goal of increasing project revenue to hire a Product Manager. If we are unable to achieve our goal of hiring a Product Manager, it is very likely only a portion (e.g. highest priority) of the Technology goals and actions below will be attainable. In such a situation, the remainder of the Technology goals may need to be rescheduled, unless someone in the broader community steps forward to drive them.

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

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• Action: Clarify and improve the DSpace value proposition. Enhance our message and goals of the project going forward.  The DSpace Steering Group is working towards establishment of a new "DSpace Marketing Working Group" to help with this effort

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• Action: Enhance communication and collaboration. In order to avoid duplicative effort / projects in the future, we need to enhance communication and collaboration between various developers, institutions and service providers, and communicate a common vision / roadmap for the platform.
  • As a part of this action, we will be developing and maintaining a Technical Roadmap for the DSpace software platform, detailing high priority development projects which can be "claimed" or shared by groups of developers, institutions or service providers
  • At the same time, we should recognize that ad-hoc or competitive work can also be beneficial. We should continue to encourage ad-hoc contributions, and even competitive contributions, but make it clear that we will actively discourage further unnecessary duplicative functionality to be added to the platform.

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