[OPEN-ILS-GENERAL] Late Bloomer

[Jason Etheridge]

On 4/25/07, Lynne Welch <welchly at oplin.org> wrote:
>     But since I'm not an academic, and my understanding of the work
> involved in coding is at a minimal level, I wanted to solicit the
> opinion of Those Who Know These Things ;-)      before I propose it to
> our State Librarian and the people at the library school for
> consideration. What do you-all think?

I think it's an excellent idea, but then, I am a bit biased. :-D  I
believe Don and Dan hit their nails on the head.  With open source,
the main thing is the process and the people, not the actual code.  If
your students were to engage with say, the Evergreen community on
these mailing lists, they could then leverage existing expertise and
lower their barriers to understanding the code.  The functionality you
develop would also be more easily shared and integrated back into the
main trunk of the software through community processes (another point
of open source software), and you wouldn't have to maintain a
"tweaked" version of the software, simply a differently configured
version.  What I'm saying is, if you do this, don't do it in
isolation!

Another low-key angle of approaching this is with remote internships
with some of the organizations already involved (GPLS, University of
Windsor, etc).  But I like the idea of partnership programs better.

-- 
Jason Etheridge
GPLS -- PINES Development
http://open-ils.org/