[MEI-L] MEI Incubator proposal

[Andrew Hankinson, Mr]

Hi all,

I've spent the last couple weeks in Virginia with Perry, working on some extensions to MEI. As part of this, we've been discussing a general framework for supporting and encouraging community development, so that members of the community can create, develop, and share their MEI extensions with others.

Towards this goal, we've come up with the idea for an "incubator" setup, where community members can publicly share their modifications and additions to MEI in a Subversion repository that is separate from the "main" MEI schema. A typical incubator project will include ODD files that will apply against and extend or modify the most current MEI schema, and documentation for the functionality the modifications bring to MEI.

Once an incubator project has reached a certain level of maturity, it may be considered for inclusion into the main MEI specification. Incubator developers may submit their ODD files to an editorial board (yet to be determined) to ensure it fits within the overall schema and goals of MEI. This is entirely optional, however -- Incubator projects are welcome to co-exist without becoming part of the core (although once they reach a certain maturity, it may be useful to move them to a "community modules" section, or something like that.) Everyone will be able to check out the latest version of the modules and see the code, but committing will be restricted to accepted project developers.

Accompanying the Subversion repository will be a wiki where community members will be invited to document their ODD module -- what functionality the module provides, any examples of how it is used, etc. Naturally, if an incubator project makes it into the MEI spec, then the documentation for the module will make it into the main MEI Guidelines document.

Any thoughts or comments about this plan? For now, I thought we could start small and keep this fairly simple. I have a couple ODD modules that are ready to go, so if some actual examples of how this would work are required, I can set this up and then send around some links.

Thanks,
-Andrew