As part of the Developer Challenge at Open Repositories 2011, Jessie Keck, Michael Klein, Bess Sadler and I submitted the emergent community for Ruby-based curation microservices. While I had written some initial code in late 2010, I only intended to experiment with the California Digital Library microservices and explore how the microservices model could be used within an application, so it was never intended to be "production" ready. Taking inspiration from Jim Jagielski's opening keynote "Open Source: It’s just not for IT anymore! (pdf)", we wanted to help foster a community around the microservices, and so we took a number of initial steps to convert the various implementations of ruby microservices into a better community-driven, collaborative project:
  1. Created a microservices "organization" on github to hold the community-driven source code repositories. Before, the projects were held under a personal account that had a diversity of projects in various states of use and support. By creating a topic-driven organization, we hope to attract contributors and promote easier discovery of these projects
  2. Created a mailing list to record decisions, answer questions, and collaborate.
  3. Agreed to a set of standards and practices for microservices projects to ensure consistency and quality across these projects:
    1. Basic "meta" files -- like README, TODO, LICENSE, etc -- should be present and contain enough information to help people get started using and contributing to the projects
    2. Clarified source code licenses, and standardized on the Apache Public License 2.0 for each project.
    3. Vastly improved the source code testing and documentation coverage, and standardized around rspec and yard. Projects are now subject to continuous integration to ensure tests pass, documentation is built, and test coverage remains high.