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The issue of building a community was also looked at in a JISC supported SCONUL project earlier this year that culminated in the 'Open Edge, Open source in libraries' event. It looks to me that what you are doing could be a great way to help move the agenda forward. The theme of the initiative was 'building capacity to help enable open source solutions to flourish in the HE library community'. After the event a (JISCMail) discussion list was set up [log in to unmask] The outputs of the initiative and conference now form part of the SCONUL Higher Education Library Technology (HELibTech) wiki. This has a general page on open source http://helibtech.com/Open+Source and specific pages on 'community' http://helibtech.com/open+source+community and a very preliminary start at mapping various forms of 'capacity' (e.g. development expertise, expertise of licensing etc). http://helibtech.com/Open+Source+Capacity Ken CEO, Ken Chad Consulting Ltd Tel +44 (0)7788 727 845. Email: [log in to unmask] www.kenchadconsulting.com Skype: kenchadconsulting Twitter: @KenChad Open Library Systems Specifications: http://libtechrfp.wikispaces.com -----Original Message----- From: Code for Libraries [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Peter Murray Sent: 18 July 2011 16:02 To: [log in to unmask] Subject: Re: [CODE4LIB] Seeking feedback on database design for an open source software registry Nate -- Thanks for the pointer to NITRC. There are some good interface elements there that might be useful to emulate. I want to be clear that our grant mandate extends only to the FreshMeat registry functionality. Source code hosting is definitely out of scope for what we are doing. Building community will be hard, particularly because the intent of the registry isn't for just developers themselves but also for any library that is interested in applying open source solutions to their library needs. It doesn't mean that the library will be developing or running the software themselves (that is where the "Provider" entity comes in, and it is a point that distinguishes this registry from FreshMeat and NITRC). Peter On Jul 17, 2011, at 11:22 PM, Nate Vack wrote: > > On Fri, Jul 15, 2011 at 2:09 PM, Peter Murray <[log in to unmask]> wrote: >> On Jul 15, 2011, at 2:59 PM, Mike Taylor wrote: >>> >>> Isn't this pretty much what FreshMeat is for? >>> http://freshmeat.net/ >> >> It is similar in concept to Freshmeat, but the scope is limited to library-oriented software (which might be too use-specific for Freshmeat and certainly harder to find among the vast expanse of non-library-oriented stuff). > > You might look at NITRC[1], which has tried very hard to do the same > thing for neuroscience software in addition to providing project > hosting like Sourceforge. They get funded by some federal grant > thing[2]. > > Unfortunately, they've also found that the world wasn't really looking > for a site to review and host a small subset of open-source projects, > so their usage isn't high. They've convinced some projects to come > live in their domain, so they seem to attract enough funding to stay > online, but they've never succeeded in becoming much of a community. > And the "people who do neuroscience" crowd is probably two orders of > magnitude larger than the "people who do open-source in libraries" > crowd -- so building a vibrant community will be even harder in this > case. > > The real problem for me is that their site doesn't seem to warrant > enough attention to really be made usable or stay up reliably. So if > you want to get software that's hosted only by them, it can be really > frustrating. It's like a crappy FreshMeat combined with a crappy, > unreliable Sourceforge. > > My ultimate take: you can probably do something more interesting with > your grant money than building a FreshMeat-alike. > > Either way, you might talk to the NITRC folks about their experiences -- Peter Murray [log in to unmask] tel:+1-678-235-2955 Ass't Director, Technology Services Development http://dltj.org/about/ LYRASIS -- Great Libraries. Strong Communities. Innovative Answers. The Disruptive Library Technology Jester http://dltj.org/ Attrib-Noncomm-Share http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.5/