[OPEN-ILS-GENERAL] Next Steps: Was Re: Late Bloomer

[Jason Etheridge]

On 4/26/07, Bill Hudson <bhudson at lancasterlibraries.org> wrote:
<snip>
> Even so, I am being to believe that PINES has created the
> nucleus of something that could become a serious option for many libraries
> and I am willing to push for broader adoption and support.

Thanks Bill!  I'll try to weave my perspective into this and respond
to your questions below, but I'm not the voice of PINES, much less the
wider Evergreen community.

> So my question to the good folks running the Evergreen project is: do you
> have a strategy for developing partnerships outside of your organization to
> broaden and deepen the support for Evergreen?

I think our hope is to entice such potential partners to join the
wider community, and not deal solely with a specific organization like
PINES.  An example would be Art Rhyno from the University of Windsor
working toward a functional acquisitions system on these very mailing
lists.  There's no formal relationship there, just that organization
picking up the mantle and getting our buy-in.

As a general strategy, we've been attending conferences and giving
presentations on Evergreen, and for the most part, folks have been
coming to us and we've been fielding responses.  We've also applied
for a Mellon grant.

> Do you have a plan in place to accommodate a measurable increase in funding
>(from potential development partners) to grow the project?

In short, we have hopes for conversations like this to help facilitate
such things. :-D  There's also thought of creating a non-profit
foundation for Evergreen.

We wanted Evergreen to be developed through a collaborative community
from the very beginning, but in practice it has turned into more of a
"if we build it they will come" situation, and that's where we find
ourselves now, with a budding community and various libraries,
vendors, individuals, and other entities expressing interest.

I've always thought of the growing of open source communities as
something organic, and I'm not sure anyone understands completely how
these communities organize themselves.  An increase in funding
ultimately leads to an increase in the number of developers, and to be
the most productive (ie. to have their patches accepted), those
developers need to integrate themselves into the existing community.
It's a social process, and not a monetary one--if PINES were to hire
another developer today, they wouldn't get the keys to the kingdom, so
to speak, instead they would be dropped right into these mailing lists.

So the "plan" is to let it happen, and try to make it as easy as
possible for others to learn the system and build a rapport with one
another.  We can certainly map out more concrete plans (which in
itself is yet another way to engage the community).  What do you
think?

Does this answer your questions?  Any suggestions?

Thanks!

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