This page outlines at a high level model for the organization of the ReShare, including roles, responsibilities and communications channels.
ReShare manages its work through application of three principles: local control, lazy consensus, and transparency. The intent of these management principles are to enable quick decision making ‘in the field’, while allowing stakeholders to weigh in when necessary.
The intent of the ReShare Steering Committee is to place and maintain ReShare as a solution for libraries for resource sharing, and to generate strategic directions, partnerships, and community. The Committee represents the project to the outside world, negotiates with new potential contributors, ensures external communication channels. It aligns activities across the member organizations.
The Product Management Team agrees upon development priorities at the level of features. It takes overall responsibility for the internal activities of the project. Participants in the product management group expressly represent their organization in discussions and decisions about the shared disposition of project resources.
The role of the product owner (PO) is to serve as the glue between the Product Management Team, Subject Matter Expert Team, and Development Team. The PO schedules and guides functional analysis and UX work and supports building out the high level project plan in Jira (epics, features, high-level stories). He or she formalizes data models, state diagrams, etc., in collaboration with subject matter experts. The PO also serves as a liaison to steering committee.
User experience (UX) designers work with subject matter experts to create wireframes visually representing features/stories prior to development. They meet one-on-one and in small groups with subject matter experts to learn about current workflows, identify pain points, and collaboratively develop ideas for improvement. UX outcomes include clickable prototypes that represent both the eventual ideal state for each feature or module, as well as short-term versioned prototypes representing realistic stages of development.
ReShare subject matter experts (SMEs) are resource sharing librarians with expertise in day-to-day workflows. They may be organized into one or more teams, depending on the needs of the project and current workloads. SMEs meet weekly with the PO and UX experts. Each ReShare partner will suggest membership for the SME team(s), but these teams are also open to participation from individuals not representing any partner organization.
The Development Team works from the backlog established by the PO in collaboration with the UX designers and SMEs. Architecture decisions are made collectively under guidance from the technical leads. The team aligns work with priorities set by the Product Management Team, accounting for blockages and best sequencing for development purposes. All code created for ReShare is submitted to Github in a ReShare project/directory structure, within the Open Library Foundation infrastructure. The Development team uses Jira for backlog and task management and Slack for daily communication. The team works on a two-week sprint cycle and meets weekly to plan and review sprints, as well as providing a monthly presentation of new functionality for stakeholders.