DSpace User Group 2007, Rome

Last week was the annual DSpace User Group Meeting, this year held in Rome, hosted by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations:

http://www.aepic.it/conf/index.php?cf=11

These guys have an interest in DSpace for sharing knowledge throught the developing world, and kindly offered to run the user group this year. The FAO building is set at the east end of the incredible Circus Maximus, and just 5 minutes up the road from the Colosseum. And we could see all of this from the 8th floor terrace cafe where lunch and coffee was served every day.

The presentations for this event are mostly available online, at:

http://www.aepic.it/conf/program.php?cf=11

If there are presenters reading this whose papers are not yet online, please contact the conference organisers so they can make it available.

I felt that this year the balance between technical and non-technical presentations was struck particularly well. While there were streams of non-technical presentations, there were highly technical tracks for the developers among us to attend. Specifically worth a mention was Scott Phillips' Introduction to Manakin, which is something we will all need to get to grips with in the long run, and something which I knew woefully little about. After that session, though, I'm confident about getting stuck in.

The quality of the work going on with DSpace is definitely reaching a high degree of maturity, with increasingly many developments leveraging the latest features of DSpace in new and innovative ways. For me this suggests that our platform has approached a critical point where we must, as a community, find a way to make these developments easier to share and easier to adopt and easier to write.

So thanks from me to the organisers. It was great to see the usual suspects again, but equally great was it to put faces to names from the mailing lists and IRC. See you all next year!