As a developer on other projects but mostly an end-user of DSpace, a few things stand out for me:
When considering administrative access to services like DSpace, it's
important to remember (and to remind the IT folk :-) that a box is not
a platform is not an application. It's easy to set up permissions so
that a given user account can do nothing but replace a specific file,
like for example dspace.war. I've done it on our test box. The
people who run a box don't have to grant free rein to those who run
the platforms (e.g. Tomcat), and the people who run a platform don't
have to grant full license to the people who run an application on it.
It's merely necessary to establish trust and negotiate boundaries. If
any party is unwilling to do that, or think there is no time to do it,
that party should take a break to think about its purpose and examine
its priorities. It's IT's job to make what you need to do doable.
One thing that helps developers to work with, rather than against,
end-users is for end-users to tell developers *what* they want to do
and resist the temptation to tell the developers *how* to do it. (We
all have this problem, whether in the doctor's office or the auto
repair shop or what have you.) It's the developer's role to analyze
requirements and propose means to meet them, because the developer has
the information to do that while the end-user has the information on
what is valuable to accomplish. Often an approach which seems
perfectly reasonable to an end-user is "obviously" wrong from the
developer's point of view, and of course developers may see nothing
wrong with solutions that are baffling to the user. The developer
should detect the underlying problem and guide the conversation back
from "how" to "what", but there are times when this does not happen.
The end-user should also be sensitive to such issues and help to make
it happen.
Never tell people how to do things. Tell them what to do and
let them surprise you with their ingenuity.
-- Gen. George Patton
There's an interesting issue of modes of communication associated with
the comment on training people to customize DSpace. Presentations
necessarily take place at a given point in time, but people in need of
tutorial material more often need it when they are taking up the task,
not whenever it is available -- there's too big a time gap between the
lecture and the lab., so to speak. I think that written material is
probably more effective here, and I applaud those who are creating it.
--
Mark H. Wood, Lead System Programmer [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Typically when a software vendor says that a product is "intuitive" he
means the exact opposite.
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