To: DLF membership
From: MacKenzie Smith (MIT) and Peter Brantley (CDL),
outgoing DLF Developers Forum co-chairs


The DLF Developers Forum is an informal group of DLF Forum attendees
who are active technologists and developers at their institutions that
require dedicated time at the Forum to meet together to share problems,
ideas, and solutions of a technical nature.

At the DLF Developers Forum in Charlottesville earlier this month we
examined the structure of the group and made some changes to reflect
the changing nature of the Forum and its audience. The following is a
summary of this new structure.

1. The dedicated DLF-DEVELOPERS mailing list will be discontinued
and we will use DLF-ANNOUNCE (i.e. this list) for all future communication.

2. The Developers Forum will continue to have a separate meeting on the
Wednesday afternoon following the main Forum. The group will have a
two-year standing chair to moderate these meetings, and the agenda will
always be the same: round-table, voluntary micro-presentations on four
topics:

-- cool new technology of interest
-- over-hyped technology
-- technical problem calling for group discussion
-- opportunities for collaboration

There will be time for discussion after each micropresentation, but there
will be at least thirty minutes at the end to select one topic for a session
and birds-of-feather (bof) meeting at the next main DLF Forum,
(see #3 below) and a temporary co-chair appointed to help organize,
moderate, and facilitate that session/bof.

The temporary co-chair will serve for the next forum, but that person
can volunteer for as many tours of duty as he or she likes. If no one
volunteers then there will be no session/bof for that Forum. Other topics
of high interest but not suitable for the developers session/bof will be
referred to the main program committee for their consideration.

3. At each DLF Forum there will be a reserved session and a bof
immediately afterwards on a technical topic selected at the previous
Developers Forum. The session will describe the topic and background
related to it, and the bof will be a facilitated discussion of that issue
open to all interested parties. At the end of the bof a decision will be
made as to whether there is sufficient interest, clear scope and
direction to spin off a new initiative (and how that will get started).

The new standing chair who will implement this new structure is John
Kunze of the California Digital Library. The topic for the next Forum
will be identifier resolution technology and will be organized by this
term's co-chair, Tim DiLauro from Johns Hopkins University. At the
Developers Forum in Austin we will solicit a new co-chair for the topic
that emerges for the following Forum.

Thanks to everyone who participated in the Developers Forum in
Charlottesville.  We think this is good progress for the group and
look forward to trying it out in Austin!

MacKenzie and Peter



MacKenzie Smith
Associate Director for Technology
MIT Libraries
Building E25-131d
77 Massachusetts Avenue
Cambridge, MA  02139
(617)253-8184
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