JA-SIG 2008

I’m at JA-SIG, St. Paul.  It’s winding down today with some sessions, a BarCamp and a uCamp.  I’m looking forward to the uCamp.  Overall, it has been a good conference, probably not as relevant for me personally as the Open Repositories Conference, but still very useful.  And it’s inspiring to see these different projects and developer groups talking to each other and learning from each other.

I’ve had the privilege of hanging out with Mark Diggory a bit as well as other  DSpace cohorts and some of the Fedora guys.  The comaradie between the Fedora and DSpace folks is encouraging. It’s a relief to know that I’m not the only one that admires Fedora’s content model and wonders why DSpace should try to reinvent that with it’s “2.0″ vision versus adopting Fedora as a storage and web services layer and benefiting from a shared developer base.  As one of the Fedora stakeholders put it, we could really turn the heat up on Microsoft by taking advantage of the best of both platforms.

Community Source and Open Source software development is thriving in the academic space.  Collaborate or die!

I’ll be posting my notes from JA-SIG 2008 over the next couple of days.  They’ll be raw, probably incoherent and fraught with errors, but there you are.