I don't *think* the suggestion was that "OS is good because your staff can hack the code".
"OS is good" in large part because of the sustainability angle. When the contributing community is big, things get fixed and improved regularly: this includes under-the-hood codebase stuff but also user interfaces. How much has WP improved for non-technical content-type people in the last 2 years? Massively! This is because the community is actively pushing those elements of the core. Also, "OS is good" because when you fall out with your current vendor you absolutely know you can walk out into a huge marketplace of people who can pick up the code and run with it.
I would, however, agree with James that it'd be good if there was some investment / time in developing OS tools, both from the community but more from vendors. Richard, you're totally awesome in pushing ahead with a plugin for the CM system you work on - but I don't see similar moves from many of the other collections management systems. I'm already on the case trying to get A Well Known Collections Management Vendor to develop a Wordpress plugin for their system but not getting anywhere fast...
Mike
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Mike Ellis
Thirty8 Digital: a small but perfectly formed digital agency: http://thirty8.co.uk
* My book: http://heritageweb.co.uk *
On 17 Oct 2013, at 10:37, Richard Light <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> On 17/10/2013 09:53, Bonewell, Perry wrote:
>>> Related to this, I'd be fascinated to hear of examples where organisations have not just used open source, but have contributed back to >the core technology in the form of modules/plugins/themes etc or even the underlying platform. I'd especially like to see examples >beyond the likes of 'install this plugin and you can put our collections on your blog' (although those are interesting too!)
>> I'd be interested too James - I find it slightly frustrating that there isn't a strong (any?) museums strand to OS CMS development - apart from Omeka I guess. Time and again people complain that these systems don't fulfil some niche or other (image metadata quoted earlier in this discussion being an example) when they can be easily extended.
>>
>> Why aren't museums investing more in developing OS tools for platforms that everyone can use - and might help museums that don't have the budget to invest long term in something that is bespoke?
> It's worth bearing in mind that this conversation is only relevant to the tiny percentage of museums who actually have IT staff, and/or who can afford "technology partners". Most museums will instead have a "system supplier" (or a horrendous home-grown Access hack, but that's another discussion). As Christiano mentioned a few posts back, responsible suppliers will ensure that all their customers can benefit from developments carried out for one customer which are more widely relevant.
>
> However, the issue of whether the underlying code is OS or not will be completely irrelevant to most users, since they won't have the resources to work at the code level anyway. They will be more than happy (I would guess) with a reasonable level of control-panel customization.
>
> I would assert that, for our community, shareable data is a more important issue than shareable code. I'm currently working on a Wordpress plugin for one widely-used museum software package, and would have no objections in principle to sharing this more widely. However, much of the plugin code relates specifically to data access mechanisms, indexing support, etc., which are specific to the particular museum database which underpins it. I am adding support for a second data interface, which expects Linked Data, but again this will be of little wider value unless there is community-wide agreement on (and implementation of) a common Linked Data framework. Hopefully Collections Trust's COPE strategy [1] (which isn't really new, Nick, but is none the worse for that :-) ) will help to address this issue.
>
> Richard
>
> [1] http://www.collectionslink.org.uk/discover/sustaining-digital/1766-cope
> --
> *Richard Light*
>
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