Launching Early Adopters

In a DSpace early adopter program, you run a trial period for your DSpace service with a few hand-picked communities before launching a full DSpace service.

While it’s not essential to run an early adopter program, it can be enormously helpful in gathering feedback, working out the kinks, and building support for DSpace.

Why Run an Early Adopter Program?

Early adopters can help evaluate components of the service that are important to you, including new software developments, community workflows, and the robustness of your service infrastructure. They can also be strong and vocal advocates of the service, spreading the word to other faculty.

One of the primary goals for running an Early Adopter Program is to gather feedback on the system. So you will want to build in feedback mechanisms to your program.

The following documents and tools will help you launch an Early Adopter Program for your DSpace service:

Choosing Early Adopters describes how to generate leads and select content communities for your Early Adopter Program.

Lessons Learned presents tips from other sites that have run early adopter programs.

Early Adopter Presentation (PowerPoint format) introduces DSpace to potential community members

Tracking Form for sorting selection criteria for Early Adopter Communities (Excel format)

Roles Form to help you keep track of people associated with each community and their individual workflow roles and authorization level

Early Adopter Program Kit (zip file)