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 tspind...@cwmars.org | 508-755-3323 x120 C/W MARS | http://www.cwmars.org 67 Millbrook St., Ste. 201 Worcester, MA 01606 *P** Go Green - **Save a tree! Please don't print this e-mail unless it's really necessary.*