How to manage repositories with more than one owner

[mkshearer]

Currently, you can only create one owner based on a ROR record, but some repositories are shared among several institutions (Slovenia for example)

[paulwalk]

There are some real challenges with this:

1. Some operations expect a one-to-many relationship between repository and owning organisation: for example, the country for a repository is extrapolated from its relationship with its (single) owner. These operations would need to be re-designed and implemented
2. The edit form for repositories uses an Ajax javascript solution to provide the autocomplete field for the owner, drawing on the cached records from the ROR database. The form would need to be re-engineered to allow the user to keep adding more "owner" fields, each of which would need to have it's own Ajax connection to the ROR data. This could degrade performance very quickly.

[paulwalk]

I think the resolution to that is that there is always one owner. If two (or more) institutions collaborate over the operation of a repository, they will have some kind of an organisation to oversee it - even if it's just a committee. The solution I propose is that we then just create a new IRD organisation for that committee, and note in its description that it is associated with the two parent institutions.

[antleaf-user]

Maybe we should produce a "Curators' FAQ" for questions like this?

[paulwalk]

@mkshearer - what do you think about the approach described above?