[DDI-users] A "home" for the DDI

[Mark R. Diggory]

One very good future goal on the site:
http://www.icpsr.umich.edu/DDI/codebook/future.html

*Identifying an ultimate "home" for the DTD where it will be maintained 
and revised when necessary*

I think getting the DDI under CVS control is critical to establishing a 
stable location for it. CVS versioning is critical to both tracking 
changes and accessing previous revisions.

sourceforge.org is a free, stable, version controlled location to house 
such content with $0 expense and minimal management overhead. 
Sourceforge provides a large number of free services as well for group 
mailing lists, feature requests, bug tracking etc to enhance the groups 
envolvement.

It would be relatively simple to get a sourceforge site up to hold the 
DDI DTD's, Schemas and related tools in such a fashion that a small 
group of core Alliance developers/members could easily manage version 
control and development independent of its "deployed" state on the ICPSR 
site.

Also, by exposing both the "development" and current published versions, 
we would create a "transparent" development environment where all 
interested alliance partners can respond easily and influence the 
advancement of the DDI at a development level as an OpsenSource project. 
It is possible then that group members can and even provide patches of 
changes that can be reviewed by the core team and applied to the cvs 
copies directly. Alliance members who are very interested in development 
  could be "voted" in to have cvs committer rights on the site similar 
to the strategy used by the Apache Foundation.

http://jakarta.apache.org/site/roles.html

Having worked in CVS systems quite a bit for both the Virtual Data 
Center project at HMDC and also for Apache Foundation projects, I have 
observed how strong the influence of simply having shared CVS version 
control can have on community involvement.

I think such a transparent centralized location would really be very 
critical to the future of the DDI. I have a couple sourceforge projects 
going at this point, and I would be glad to lend a hand in the 
establishment of a DDI Project on the sourceforge site.

-Mark Diggory
Harvard MIT Data Center