Community Source Software: Complex collaborations as told by two Program Managers
The decision to implement open, community-supported technologies can bring with it complexities and efforts not always experienced by the use of proprietary solutions. “Open Source”, by definition, can also lead to confusion and misunderstanding of the true cost of implementation, as well as underestimation of the importance of collaboration and advocacy.
Program Managers are in a unique position to help build collaborative bridges as a means of uniting users, supplying actionable use cases, and fostering open dialogue. In this talk, we will discuss commonalities and differences in our roles and how our respective organizations must collaborate, both internally and cross-organizationally, in an attempt to meet the needs of multiple technical and user communities in the digital repository realm.
As Program Managers of both an open-source, community-supported software, and an academic library’s digital repository, which uses said software, presenters will highlight and discuss their perspectives, methodologies and their on-going work to attempt to solve issues faced by many others within their own communities. Through exploratory work to identify barriers to adoption, migration and paying technical debt, we will discuss common goals and challenges to sustaining preservation repository technology across complex open frameworks.