After much discussion, “the developers need to figure out the best way to accomplish those goals, as feasible.

That’s how we get good products.”

Yes.

Now, I may be prejudiced because I’m a developer — AND I’m also a librarian. So one thing I think we in library land need is more librarian-developers. (And I don’t necessarily just mean ‘MLIS degreed’, I think you can be a librarian-developer without having an MLIS).

But also, something I’ve been thinking is:

users are to the library as a whole
as: the library as a whole is to the systems dept and developers
as: the library is to it’s vendors

(Put that analogy on your GRE!)

In the sense that: We librarians as a whole are responsible for understanding user’s needs and using our professional expertise to figure out clever feasible ways of meeting them. We can NOT simply let the users tell us exacty what they want and then do it without thinking — becuase they don’t know (even if they sometimes think they do — there is LOTS of discussion in non-library contexts about how what users SAY they want isn’t always what will make them most happy.)

It’s an abandonment of our professional responsibility to try and do that. Similarly, vendors can’t simply expect customers to spell out what they want in precise detail and then do it. That’s an abandonment of the vendor’s responsibility to figure out what the customers are actually trying to do and need, and figure out clever feasible ways of providing it.

SO. Similarly, in these kind of open source collaborations, we need discussions involving librarian-developers and non-developer librarians, in which the needs and goals are figured out — and then the developers need to figure out the best way to accomplish those goals, as feasible.

That’s how we get good products.