Since Project Electron kicked off in September, we’ve made significant progress on a number of different fronts. First, together with our Marist College partners, we created a milestones document which lays out major phases of work. We also developed some general principles and overall approaches to licensing project deliverables, including code, documentation and planning documents. Since we anticipate both of these documents will change over time, we’ve versioned them using git (and have pushed a copy to GitHub) so we can keep track of those changes.
Right now, we’re in the middle of an intensive discovery phase, where we are gathering user stories from our donor and depositor organizations, other information professionals, our researchers and staff via in-person interviews and online surveys. We’re also looking at the data from similar projects which have also gathered these user stories, including Hydra-in-a-Box, ArcLight and other recent projects, so we can take advantage of the insights that work has generated.
By the end of the year, we hope to have a substantial set of user stories, from which we will build a set of user personas. As our values say, we want to place users at the center of this project, so we’ll be using those personas heavily over the coming years to guide Project Electron. Starting in January, we’ll be developing system requirements and following those up with implementations.
Stay tuned for further updates! If you have questions, drop one of us on the team a line or find us on Twitter at @rockarch_org!