Together we build DSpace 7

Looking back over the past 3 years, it has become hard to identify an Atmire team member who has not yet, directly or indirectly, contributed to DSpace 7. From watercooler and lunch talks, to the diagrams on our whiteboards and the lines of code on the workstations all around the office, there has not been a single endeavour so persistently on top of our minds for so long.

Atmire leaders Lieven Droogmans, Ben Bosman and Art Lowel prepare and contribute to weekly DSpace 7 workgroup and entities meetings and strategic discussions. Make no mistake that they are only a fraction of the group of people putting blood, sweat and tears into the new codebase on a day to day basis. Meet two of them: Lotte and Raf.

With 300 contributions in the last year, and over 62.000 lines of code added to the dspace-angular git repository, Lotte Hofstede stands among the top contributors. So many of the Angular features and improvements have passed by her fingertips that it is probably easier listing the few ones that she hasn't been involved in.

I love being able to work with new technologies and help elevate DSpace's user experience to a higher level

Over in the main DSpace git repository , where the REST API contributions are being made, Raf Ponsaerts has been working his way up, into the leagues where he's only preceded by contributors who joined the ranks of the DSpace Committers.

Joining forces with many different developers can prove to be challenging at times, but it makes DSpace 7’s quality unprecedented.

All together, the Atmire team has contributed over 500 days or 4000 hours of effort at this point. Of course, numbers never cover the entire story. Every contribution, small or large, that gets us closer to DSpace 7.0, is immensely welcome and appreciated.

The effort of evaluating JSP and XMLUI feature implementations, taking the best of both worlds and then adding more, should not be underestimated. The progress is consistent, the methods are solid and transparent. Fueled by the enthusiasm of people like Lotte, Raf and countless other contributors, we will get there: a new place of user delight, excellence and innovation where DSpace has not yet been before.