Announcing the dataverse-dev mailing list

[Philip Durbin]

Dataverse is an open source project that loves contributors! That's what we say in our dev guide and we mean it: http://guides.dataverse.org/en/4.3/developers/intro.html :)

Most of the developers who work on the main Dataverse code base at https://github.com/IQSS/dataverse are collocated at IQSS, but lately we've being trying a few things to better connect with developers in the community.

First, in recent months we've started having "community calls". You can see when the next call is and check out notes from previous calls at http://dataverse.org/community-calls

Second, a number of project-specific mailing lists have been created (mostly as a result of the community calls):

* https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/dataverse-export-wg
* https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/dataverse-internationalization-wg
* https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/dataverse-migration-wg

Third, we've created a new page linked from the project website homepage specifically for developers: http://dataverse.org/developers

The project-specific lists are great, but the purpose of this message is to announce a new "dataverse-dev" mailing list for developers who need to coordinate their efforts and pull requests:

* https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/dataverse-dev

I'm cross-posting this to the main "dataverse-community" mailing list and I wanted to take a moment to explain the difference between these two lists:

The dataverse-community list is broad in scope and a good place for anyone in the Dataverse community to discuss the Dataverse software, related software, data publishing, etc.

The dataverse-dev list is where developers will geek out about code at https://github.com/IQSS/dataverse and communicate any breaking changing that require database migrations (and related fixes) to keep everyone's development environments in working order. We can argue about tabs vs. spaces if necessary. :)

If you are a developer who wants to make use of Dataverse APIs but are not interested in the guts of the (mostly Java) main code base, you might want to eschew the dataverse-dev list and instead post to the dataverse-community list (if your question isn't answered by the API Guide at http://guides.dataverse.org/en/latest/api ).

I hope that cross-posting this to the dataverse-community list will reach all the developers out there but I'll also try to reach out to everyone listed in the "Dataverse Community Contributors" doc I've been trying to keep up to date at https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1o9DD-MQ0WkrYaEFTD5rF_NtyL8aUISgURsAXSL7Budk/edit?usp=sharing . Some of these developers pop into http://chat.dataverse.org from time to time so I'll try to reach them there.

We will be updating https://github.com/IQSS/dataverse/blob/master/CONTRIBUTING.md , the dev guide, and other places to mention the new dataverse-dev list. This is merely intended as a first post. :)

Phil

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Philip Durbin
Software Developer for http://dataverse.org
http://www.iq.harvard.edu/people/philip-durbin