Building and sustaining a community for the Open Encyclopedia System (ComOES)

• Applicant: Dr. Brigitte Grote, since 5/2024
• Term: since 2024
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 527793619

This project aims to establish sustainable structures for exchange and cooperation between users of an already existing publication infrastructure, the Open Encyclopedia System (OES), in form of an OES community. The project will initiate and structure processes to enable the OES user group to develop sustainable solutions for infrastructural tasks in a demand-oriented and collaborative manner. OES is a standardised platform for creating, publishing and maintaining scholarly lemma-based publications (encyclopaedias, lexicons, handbooks, etc.) in the humanities and social sciences in open access. OES was developed at the Center for Digital Systems (CeDiS) at the University Library of the Freie Universität Berlin as part of a DFG grant (LIS, 2016-2020). The source code is available on GitHub under a free licence. The provision of an open source software that has been developed "in-house" and its use and further development by third parties brings about new challenges in terms of coordinated cross-site development along the needs of (potential) OES users and the sustainability of the software. This transformational process from "centralised" to self-organised structures based on the division of labour and participatory communication forums is initiated and organised by the project. An analysis of existing information infrastructures with "distributed responsibility" provides an overview of models and success factors for collaborative development and maintenance. In workshops with OES users, information and communication structures and concepts for the collaborative further development of OES will be developed, and forms of work for long-term exchange and cross-location cooperation (OES community) after the end of project funding will be established. This includes agreeing on self-organised negotiation processes as well as describing and defining responsibilities.

• DFG Programme: Cooperation and Networking (Scientific Library Services and Information Systems)
• Ehemaliger Antragsteller: Dr. Andreas Brandtner, until 5/2024