How we keep a small open-source community afloat: reflections on GeoBlacklight
GeoBlacklight is an open-source software project based on Blacklight and optimized for geospatial resource discovery. Participants in the GeoBlacklight community come from various professional and intellectual backgrounds (including map librarians, GIS analysts, software developers, metadata specialists, applied researchers, and others), but we share a common interest in making geospatial data easily accessible to the research community and the broader public. The number of institutions adopting GeoBlacklight has grown considerably in recent years, and we appointed a Community Coordinator in 2020. Despite this growth, we are still a relatively small group and are always looking for new ways of maintaining momentum and attracting new participants. This talk will provide an overview of our current development practices, including our technical values, roadmap, and new metadata application profile. It will also discuss our efforts to diversify our community by promoting activities beyond code commits, particularly during our bi-annual community sprints. Finally, it will reflect on our attempts to establish basic governance that considers the divergent collaboration styles of our community members and the limitations of the “do-ocracy model.”
