Steering Group
The Steering Group is nominated and elected by the Leadership Group. The Steering Group provides project oversight and ensures that the priorities of the Leadership Group and members are met, by:
- Providing strategic direction to the Project
- Recommending annual budget allocations
- Presenting key decisions to the Leadership Group for discussion and approval
- Raising funds and securing other resources on behalf of the Project
- Overseeing project operations
The current members of the Steering Group are available on the DSpace website.
Leadership Group
The Leadership Group is made up of Gold and Platinum project members, along with representatives from institutions contributing at least 0.5 FTE in-kind developers. The group will also include some elected member representatives from the Silver, Bronze, and Developing Nation contributor levels. The Leadership Group approves the overall priorities and strategic direction of the project by:
Approving the annual budget allocation and any modifications
Approving the product roadmap
Approving the strategic direction
Nominating and electing Steering Group members
Voting on key decisions presented by Steering Group
Helping to raise funds and secure other resources on behalf of the project
The current members of the Leadership Group are available on the DSpace website. More information on the various membership levels and benefits can be found on the DuraSpace membership page and DSpace Governance page.
Committers Group
DSpace Committers have autonomous control over the code and are also the primary support team for DSpace. The primary responsibilities of Committers are:
Maintain the codebase; Committers are the only individuals who can actively change/commit to the codebase
Review all code contributions/changes to ensure stability, etc
Merge/accept community code contributions
Help to resolve bugs or security issues within codebase
Help to provide ongoing support to community developers and users (via IRC, mailing lists, etc.)
Perform and manage new releases based on the Technical Roadmap (from the Technology Advisory Group).
The Committers group is a meritocracy -- members are added from the pool of volunteer Contributors based on merit. Anyone may be nominated as a Committer by anyone else. Only existing Committers may vote to add a nominated person to the Committers group.
DSpace Community Advisory Team (DCAT)
The DSpace Community Advisory Team (DCAT) represents the interests of repository managers and administrators across the globe and, indirectly, DSpace end users. DCAT is a permanent Working Group that advises other DSpace project governance and leadership groups. The Team solicits feedback through community-wide discussions, surveys, etc. to help ensure future software releases address the needs of the community. DCAT submits an annual report to the DSpace Steering group that makes the report public after review.
A specific area of focus for DCAT is defined annually by DCAT and the Steering Group.