[OPEN-ILS-GENERAL] It Takes a Village: OSS Models of Collaboration & Sustainability

[Tim Spindler]

I attended this forum for the last two days in Baltimore representing the
Evergreen community. It was created under an IMLS grant and run by Lyrasis.
The goal of the forum seemed a little vague but ultimately in the end they
seem to want to develop a report and identify tools which would assist
organizations in starting up open source projects and managing them long
term.


The discussion began with representatives evaluating their stage of their
project:


   -

   New/Starting Up
   -

   Growing
   -

   Self Sustaining
   -

   Maintenance
   -

   End of life


The discussion focused on what does the above categories mean.  Are they
related to the community, organization or technology?  Does the cycle apply
to individual versions of the software or the life cycle of the project?
  Is there a difference between Self Sustaining and maintenance.  Some of
the attendees seemed to want to focus on the development cycle but not the
life cycle of the project.  Others focused on the life cycle of the project.

Established key top level issues for open source projects


   -

   Governance
   -

   Resources
   -

   Technology
   -

   Community


Each project identified where they were on a scale of 1-10 for each
category.  Some projects identified

The discussion on the Thursday looked at the four areas identified
previously (governance, resources, technology and community) and focused on
what was needed to advance an a project in these areas.

We also discussed what tools and the process for projects to develop based
on the first day’s discussion.

Commentary

The forum was strongly represented by large academic research institutions
even though it was ostensibly to include open source projects for all
cultural institutions. These projects almost all had much more top down
project management that controlled development and to a lesser extent
support.  One notable exception was Koha (Chris Cormack was representing
the Koha community).  Wikipedia, of course, has crowd sourced content so it
has a more bottom up  approach. The other open source projects had
councils/committees/partners or simply what was termed a benevolent
dictator controlling the project.  These groups control feature development
and manage the project.  All the projects were at various stages in the
life of the project.

Outcomes

Lyrasis will be writing a report that will come out next year with the goal
of identifying a process for developing and possibly managing open source
projects.

Projects Represented


   -

   Archivematica
   -

   ArchivesSpace
   -

   Avalon Media System
   -

   BitCurator
   -

   Blacklight
   -

   Collective Access
   -

   ConservationSpace
   -

   Coral
   -

   DSpace
   -

   Duraspace
   -

   Fedora
   -

   Islandora
   -

   Knowledge Project
   -

   Koha
   -

   Library Simplified
   -

   LOCKSS
   -

   MetaArchive
   -

   OLE/Folio
   -

   Omeka
   -

   Public Knowledge Project
   -

   Sakai
   -

   Samvera
   -

   Specify Software Project
   -

   Vega
   -

   VuFind
   -

   Wikimedia (Wikipedia)


-- 

Tim Spindler | Executive Director

tspindler at cwmars.org | 508-755-3323 x120

C/W MARS | http://www.cwmars.org

67 Millbrook St., Ste. 201

Worcester, MA 01606

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