Hi all,
At ALA Midwinter in January, Ron Gagnon of NOBLE and I attended a
presentation on the Knight News Challenge on Libraries. The Knight
Foundation is offering grants to projects that help libraries serve 21st
century information needs. There is more information on the grant
available at
https://www.newschallenge.org/challenge/how-might-libraries-serve-21st-century-information-needs/brief.
MassLNC is planning to submit at least one, maybe two ideas for a grant
related to the Evergreen project, with the hope that one of them may get
funded. I've been meeting with the MassLNC partners over the past few
weeks to come up with ideas for grants. I would like to share what we're
planning with the rest of the community to see if you have feedback on
the projects or if you have any interest in helping us out.
One of the ideas we came up with is a development project to improve the
end-user experience in Evergreen. The second project is an idea to kick
off a developer bootcamp for Evergreen. The second idea is something
that will require a lot of community involvement and for which we will
definitely need volunteers willing to help out before submitting the
idea to the grant foundation.
I'll start with the development project. We decided to go with a project
that we describe as one that reduces the dead ends users encounter when
searching for the information they need. We started with the idea of
bolstering our current use of metarecords to group formats and editions
in a search. We believe that by strengthening the way metarecords are
used in the system, we might find that defaulting to a "group formats
and editions" search could provide a better search experience for users
and allow us to do things like easily leading users to other formats and
editions directly from the record summary page.
We expanded upon this idea to think of other ways we might be able to
lead users to the information they need. Some of these ideas align with
ideas that have been raised in our search discussion. You can read the
current application at
https://www.newschallenge.org/challenge/how-might-libraries-serve-21st-century-information-needs/submissions/leading-information-seekers-to-the-material-they-need.
Feel free to let me know if you have feedback on the ideas presented
there. Our goal was to include features that would provide assistance
for users from that search results page while also avoiding projects
that are replicating features already widely available elsewhere since
this grant should be supporting things that are fairly new.
Here is what we had in mind for the other grant idea. In the past,
Evergreen has been involved in various internship programs to get
college students or others involved in making contributions to the
project. While we have had some success, I think there have also
encountered various issues. In many other open-source projects that
participate in these programs, the interns often stay around after the
project and continue contributing to the project. However, this is
difficult with Evergreen because participation generally comes from
those working for Evergreen libraries or who have some other stake in
libraries. If we reached out to groups that are already involved in
libraries (or those who are already working on Evergreen), we may be
more successful in growing developers who may make further contributions
to the project. I think we also sometimes have trouble mentoring these
interns and that the bar for making even small contributions to
Evergreen is fairly high.
The developer bootcamp is another take on trying to grow the body of
volunteers who can make code contributions to Evergreen.
- The intended audience is current members of the Evergreen community
who want to improve their skills at contributing code to Evergreen,
people from the general library/tech community (e.g. Code4Lib'ers), and
students from MLS programs.
- Current members of the Evergreen community (core committers, other
veteran technical folks) would be instructors/mentors.
- We would kick it off with an initial in-person meetup among the
instructors/mentors to get their own training on how to mentor new
contributors to the community and to brainstorm ideas for ways to make
entry into the community easier. The time could also be used to identify
what could be covered in a bootcamp. This is something that I think
would need to be an important component to ensure we are providing a
valuable experience to participants.
- When we "brainstorm ideas for ways to make entry into the community
easier," we may come up with improvements that could be funded by the
grant. For example, maybe we could put funds towards building Debian or
Ubuntu packages for Evergreen so that new code contributors don't need
to go through an arduous installation process when starting their work
with Evergreen.
- The actual bootcamp would be a multi-day (weeklong?) boot camp to
introduce the students to the Evergreen code, community conventions etc.
- After the bootcamp, continue to schedule monthly meetups via IRC for
further learning and mentoring. Participants would be expected to make
code contributions, do testing, etc. Maybe we could make it a game and
give people points for each contribution they make.
- Those who complete the program would get a scholarship to the next
Evergreen conference. Or, depending on the timing, to the next hack-a-way.
The funds from Knight would mainly cover the costs of travel and for
scholarships, but, as I mentioned above, there could also be funds
applied to the bit where we lower the threshold for making contributions
to Evergreen.
My questions related to the bootcamp idea are:
* Does this sounds like a good idea?
* Are there people who would be willing to help out as
instructors/mentors for the bootcamp? This isn't a firm commitment, but,
if I hear crickets on this question, I know it's not something we should
pursue further. Also, please note, my idea is that any travel expenses
related to the bootcamp would be covered by the grant.
* I also would love to have some volunteers willing to help me plan for
the bootcamp, but, if there is sufficient interest in the first set of
volunteers, I will also tap people directly with this request.
* If we get positive answers from the first two questions, are there
ways we can improve upon this idea?
Thanks to everyone who read this far in my e-mail. I look forward to
hearing your thoughts!
Kathy
