Goal is to ensure that all new feature requests made in JIRA are reviewed not only by DSpace Committers, but also by other community members as represented by DCAT.
1) Each DCAT member selects one JIRA issue to review and faciliate discussions on approximately every 6 weeks. The will be know as the DCAT discussion leader for that issue.
2) The DCAT discussion leader will select a week on the DCAT discussion schedule to lead DCAT team discussion on their select issue.
3) For their selected week, the discussion leader will post a summary of their issue on the DSpace discussion forum and their proposed rating of the issue -- indicating their estimation of 1) how broadly the issue is of interest to the community and 2) the priority of the issue (high, medium, low). The discussion leader will post a message to the DCAT mailing list to prompt and encourage DCAT members to weigh in. DCAT members will add comments and vote on whether or not they agree with the discussion leader's priority level (voting with either +1, -1 or 0 if no opinion). Each discussion will last 1 week and all DCAT members are expected to vote on every issue.
4) Once the DCAT vote is complete, the discussion leader will post a summary of the DCAT discussion (or a cut and paste of the full discussion from the forum) to the issue in JIRA.
5) Following the vote and DCAT assessment, the discussion leader will contact the current JIRA 'assignee' (or if not assigned the 'reporter') to discover the current status.
6) It is highly recommended that following the week your are the DCAT discussion leader that you attend the weekly DSpace Committer meeting. If you have not received a response about the new feature status (or if the issue is unassigned), you may request the DSpace Tech Lead (Tim Donohue) put your JIRA issue on the meeting agenda. This will provide you an opportunity to ask any questions that the may have and/or a regular chance to share information with the Committers.
7) If the new feature is determined to be of high interest and high priority and if it is clear that the new feature is slated for a future release, no further action is required. If it is unclear if a high interest/high priority new feature will make a future release or if more clarification from the community would be helpful, the issue is a candidate for a community-wide discussion, which will be scheduled by DCAT discussion leader. The goal is not to exceed more than 2 community-wide new feature discussions in a month. The discussion will be announced on the mailing list, but will take place in the wiki-based DSpace discussion forum and anyone is free to participate. The discussion will last 1 week. If there are people interested in helping to develop a specific feature, the discussion leader will help connect individuals/organizations to start a project group to continue the effort.
8) There will be a monthly DCAT meeting on the 2nd Tuesday of every month. This meeting is information sharing / process refinement / problem resolution meeting. Most of the 'real' work for DCAT will be done asynchronously throughout the month.
