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The DSpace Foundation brings together a diverse group of nearly 500 organizations from over 50 different countries. The role of the Foundation is to lead the collaborative development of open source software for the global community-enabling innovation and services for access, provision, stewardship, and re-use of digital materials. DSpace Foundation is a 501(c)3 non-profit corporation established in Massachusetts, USA.
In addition to the overarching role of the Foundation you might ask, "What initiatives is the Foundation leading of interest to me?" Here are a few key initiatives that are aimed at improving collaboration, communication and coordination within the community.
Platform Roadmap and development - Brad McLean has joined us as technical director and is leading a team of developers to re-architect the current platform to be more modular, flexible and abstract the current datamodel. The re-architecting of DSpace was one of the key initiatives the community identified they needed but could not manage without central support. There are several ways for the community to get involved in this process to give input and help advance the development. To learn more visit the wiki.
Newsletter - each month we publish a community newsletter so the community knows what the foundation is working on as well as other key projects in the community. You can see all published newsletters here.
Website - www.dspace.org, We have updated our website, and continue to work on it to let new folks learn about DSpace, what it is, who is using it, and how to get started.
Documentation - The Foundation was able to coordinate the documentation effort for the release of a full pdf manual for the 1.5.1 release, view manual here. We intend to manage and improve the documentation process so all can comment and edit the documentation, yet there are official releases reviewed for accuracy and available for download.
Training - We have worked to put together a comprehensive set of training materials on the website, and will start to develop our own training seminars through webinars and in person. Next week we will have an introductory video about DSpace for new users, and it will be accessible via our website. This work was done by one of our partners @Mire.
Community meetings - The first DSpace Foundation sponsored community meeting is taking place at SPARC. For more information visit here.
Feature request/issue tracking system - Last week we launched JIRA, which is a tool for the community to input bugs, feature requests and allows them to easily follow progress in the technical community as it relates to software development.
Global outreach committee - This is a group of 12 Managers of DSpace that meet with the Foundation monthly to set goals on how to work together to develop materials to better support the community, help schools in remote regions have local points of contact, and identify the priorities of repository managers within the community. To find out more, click here.
Awareness - We have created brochures, marketing materials, banners etc. which we use at all the conferences (such as SPARC, DLF, CNI, DCC etc.) to create awareness of the platform . We also have spent a massive amount of time identifying the current users to date, which currently is 485. We will be publishing the complete list on our website.
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