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- Thank you to our members who traveled to Albuquerque earlier this month to share ideas for improving DSpace, Fedora, and VIVO at the DuraSpace Summit (see report below).
- The 2017 Membership Campaign is underway with the aim of deeply engaging members from all over the world in working together to provide enduring access to the world’s digital heritage.
- One web site We have started work on combining our project and services web sites into a single DuraSpace web site. Based on our Summit discussions and previous strategic evaluation DuraSpace is headed in the direction of integrating mindshare, resources, and efforts across technologies where possible. This effort initiative is coupled with the strategic suggestion from our community that we position the value of our organization “higher” in the scholarly ecosystem food chain to more fully align our mission with the objectives of our partners, collaborators, and customers. In addition we have had appeals from international groups to define more clearly nuances in our tools and services and to promote the DuraSpace organization as a whole as the "go-to group" for our suite of open source technologies and hosted services. A unified web presence is step towards this goal.
- Welcome! This month we extend a warm welcome welcome to Erin Tripp, our new Business Development Manager who will join us on May 1, and Michele Mennielli, who will serve as our International Membership and Partnership Manager beginning on July 1.
Erin has a tremendous breadth and depth of experience with community-supported open source repository software, coupled with strong communications and interpersonal skills. She is creative, thoughtful, and direct, all qualities necessary to succeed developing and fostering new community efforts. Michele has worked with DuraSpace on many DSpace-related marketing initiatives targeted at greater International engagement. He is seen as a leader in the community with a large global network and a proven track record community building. We are thrilled to have them on board!
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Suggestions ranged from an idea to collaboratively develop a high-level environmental scan or “map” of the scholarly ecosystem that would rationalize the knowledge infrastructure space, to the idea that DuraSpace might provide a layer of service service for member organizations that would enable them to host DuraSpace services under their own brand. Members also discussed new strategies to fund and sustain open source project technical development and how to relate activities and tactics to increased engagement beyond Canada and the US.
DSpace, Fedora and VIVO project leaders spent the remainder of the day working on project-specific questions, marketing strategies, policies and related tasks.
(DSpace and VIVO summaries summary to come)
DSpace
Discussions at the DSpace breakout concentrated on two main topics: finding ways to increase membership (especially for non-US institutions), and working to better engage our large Registered Service Provider network. To increase membership those in attendance felt it was important to provide more tangible benefits to becoming a member, e.g. early notification of security issues, discounts for training/webinars, or even ways that member institutions could "vote" on tickets/features to prioritize for the next release. With regards to the DSpace Registered Service Provider network, it was noted that some service providers contribute more directly to the open source community (via code, support on lists meeting attendence, presentations, etc). DuraSpace should find ways to encourage community contributions from all registered service providers (potentially as part of the contract) and/or recognize those that contribute more significantly.
Fedora
Representatives of the Fedora membership focused on topics relating to sustainability, with the working definition of, "sustained financial support and stakeholder engagement for ongoing innovation". It was recognized that financial health should come from a diversification of project revenue streams, while engagement and innovation opportunities rest with deeper alignment and coordination with adjacent projects, such as Islandora and Hydra. Notions of software sustainability were discussed in the context of an official policy of support for critical patches to previous major releases and formalized, production-scale release testing infrastructure.
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