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DSpace Developer and DCAT Meeting Notes

Wiki page for the meeting: DevMtg 2015–06–08 – OR15 Meeting

•  Building the ground work for strategic planning
• DSpace is eleven or twelve years old – this is a good time to take inventory and begin to do strategic planning based on the last few years of planning
• Planning has been done in a transparent way: all notes are on the wiki
• Feedback needed

Maureen Walsh: Overview of 2014–2015 Strategic Plan

•  Community and Sustainability plans are the least developed; if you want to get more involved, they could use your help
• Goals focus on the next three years, but extend longer

Discussion on Community Goals

•  Historically, DSpace has grown organically: if someone wants a new feature, it gets developed and contributed. It should be made clear that this roadmap is a departure from the way development has been done in the past.
• We do have a very active userbase, a lot of people are contributing. How do we sustain that?
• We are proposing that the model for DSpace development will have to change. We are proposing a much more managed process. We will be coordinating the work around releases and asking institutions to commit resources toward development sprints.
• Why we think this will work: Fedora 4
• We will need to change the rules for committers: as it is now, if enough committers agree on a feature, it gets in. Going forward, the committers will only work on features that are part of the roadmap.

Discussion on Sustainability Goals

•  We need to be better at getting the message out: what is DSpace, what does it do, etc, what does it give you that others don’t?
• The DSpace Marketing Group is working on putting together a draft marketing plan, which will be completed in a couple months
• Product Manager role is promotion of the product overall: outreach, gathering use cases, fund raising, etc.
• Currently looking for resources to fund a full-time Product Manager
• If you are in a position that you can make a personal appeal to a non-member, DSpace-using institution to join, then please do

Discussion on Technology Goals

•  No plan for a complete DSpace rewrite, but a UI rewrite would be OK
• What are the fundamentals of the modern IR use case? What do we need to focus on?
• 130 or more use cases have been gathered and are being analyzed and prioritized
• These use cases drove the development of the road map
• Agility and flexibility are paramount goals
• Feedback is needed
• Non-developer DSpace end user comment: excited to see the proposed changes
• DCAT meeting is 2nd Tuesday of every month; all are welcome to join
• UI rewrite is the most significant: it is the most customized locally and will require a lot of support for adoption
• A lot seems to be riding on the future Product Manager; we shouldn’t rely on them to solve these problems for us; we need to support them
• The earliest we can get the PM would be 2016
• There is no way to get around the problem of having two UIs
• Need to be reassured that the new interface will
• Who will do the UI work? There needs to be a full-time developer paid by DuraSpace.
• Several institutions have already promised resources to get this done. We think there are enough people lined up now to accomplish our goals
• What features will be moved out of the core functionality?
• We have some use cases that we have deemed high priority. One feature that will be moved out of the core is one of the duplicate statistics modules

Tim gives a brief version of his roadmap slide presentation. More will be discussed at the Thursday session.

Notes on roadmap presentation

•  Concentration will be on the next two releases: 6 and 7
•  c.f. RoadMap wiki page
• Anonymous feedback can be given on the wiki
• DSpace 6.0 will be the last ad-hoc-development release, but with an eye to the roadmap; 7.0 will fully align with the roadmap
• 7.0 will be late 2016 / early 2017
• Need to start planning immediately!

Discussion

•  Idea: Virtual collections based on a search query. What is a collection other than a tag? What does it mean for something to be in a collection?
• There are wiki pages for each of the priority use cases
• API seems to be conspicuously missing. Is the idea that the new user interface will interact with a Web API that supports the entire suite of - - DSpace interactions
• Part of the agenda is to figure out what is missing in the current REST API. We will need to fill in those gaps.
• This is the time to make the API the canonical way to interact with DSpace
• Single UI will be a massive job; API will be another massive job; if I were to focus on one massive job, it would be the API
• Top down or bottom up?
• Developers agree that the core business logic is where we want to be.
• What is the difference between refactor and rewrite?
• Refactor can be done incrementally, whereas a complete rewrite would have to happen “behind closed doors” until it is completed
• Fedora did a lot of new development, which was a risky venture albeit a successful one
• Difference between us and Fedora: The Fedora group had enough resources, with committed institutions contributing $30,000. Fedora has about 250 institutions; DSpace has over two thousand. We need to figure out how to best harness that large user group, particularly from non-North-American institutions
• How can we reach out to the non-USA institutions?
• Mostly around what’s going on in the UK: everything we are doing around repositories is in preparation of the open access ref
• Need to come back to the definition of contribution; in-kind contributions is a way forward; suggest we don’t close the gate on random, ad-hoc improvements
• Can DSpace try to work more with the European funding models
• Repositories have changed since DSpace stared. We use it for a lot more things nowadays. DSpace has to be a place for other kinds of content
• Is DuraSpace able to accept smaller contributions? Full membership is a challenge.
• Is there marketing material for how to convince your boss to support DSpace?

BREAK