Committers Group

DSpace Committers have autonomous control over the code and are also the primary support team for DSpace. The primary responsibilities of Committers are:

• Maintain the codebase; Committers are the only individuals who can actively change/commit to the codebase
• Review all code contributions/changes to ensure stability, etc
• Merge/accept community code contributions
• Help to resolve bugs or security issues within codebase
• Help to provide ongoing support to community developers and users (via IRC, mailing lists, etc.)
• Perform and manage new releases based on the roadmap.

Anyone may be nominated as a Committer by anyone else. Typically, nominations are made by existing Committers on the basis of sustained contribution to DSpace that indicates an ability to fulfill Committer responsibilities. Examples of such contribution are participation in discussions on the DSpace mailing lists, Slack etc, participation in developer meetings, reporting bugs, help with testing, and contribution of code via pull requests. Only existing Committers may vote to add a nominated person to the Committers group.

DSpace Community Advisory Team (DCAT)

The DSpace Community Advisory Team (DCAT) represents the interests of repository managers and administrators across the globe and, indirectly, DSpace end users. DCAT is a permanent Working Group that advises other DSpace project governance and leadership groups. The Team solicits feedback through community-wide discussions, surveys, etc. to help ensure future software releases address the needs of the community. DCAT submits an annual report to the DSpace Steering group that makes the report public after review.

A specific area of focus for DCAT is defined annually by DCAT and the Steering Group.

DSpace Marketing Interest Group (DMIG)

The DSpace Marketing Interest Group (DMIG) began activities in April of 2015. The main purpose of the Group it is to define the right strategies to highlight the benefits of the open source solution for the Community and effectively communicate those to the users and potential users. The reason for doing so it is that the more people are aware of of such benefits the more people might be interested in financially supporting the project and in becoming Member/Sponsors of DuraSpace. This will allow the organization to keep investing in the project and advancing the software, making it more and more compliant with the ever-changing needs related to the repository world.

Currently the main scope of DMIG is to create a Marketing and Communication Strategy document: a complete analysis of the current DSpace landscape and, more importantly, a set of guidelines to define the future strategies and rationalise them.

The DSpace Marketing Interest Group is also working on a secondary scope: identifying specific actions that requires a shorter time to be made concrete. To make it possible, Working Groups are being created with individual work group charges and related documentation for action.

Sub-Groups of DMIG:

• Telling DSpace Stories (TDS) Work Group (2015) - The Telling DSpace Stories Working Group of the DSpace Marketing Interest Group aims to increase interactions and build deeper connections between community members and institutions by creating and publishing stories about their DSpace repositories.