London, UK The Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) has opened an Ideascale web site to encourage discussion towards defining repositories to feed into JISC repositories architecture work. To manage this discussion JISC is trying out Ideascale which is designed to “crowdsource” ideas, or manage large, distributed collaboration among undefined groups of people using Web 2.0 technologies.

It’s easy to register and contribute your thoughts about what a repository is, or to vote on someone else’s idea. The top vote-getter idea so far is based on the simple idea that a repository should be part of the user’s (author/researcher/learner) workflow.
You can view the existing ideas and join in the discussion at: http://jiscrepository.ideascale.com/. A brief discussion of repository definitions can be found here.