Opening Remarks, DuraSpace Strategic Overview "State of the Union"
Michele Kimpton and board president Paul Courant opened the meeting over lunch with a quick review of the agenda and introductions to members of the DuraSpace board who were in attendance.
Paul said that he equates "chair of the board" with a winning Monopoly position and went on to endorse an expanded DuraSpace board as a new opportunity to better represent project interests by including those who are directly working on developing software in decision making. He asked for a moment of silence to honor DuraSpace board member Ann Wolpert, who passed away last year.
Kimpton reviewed the DuraSpace "myths" that she "busted" last year followed by an overview of key strategic work ahead for 2014 which is "building a sustainable model for the organization" by relating a new membership model to ongoing project governance. She sees this strategy as a way to deepen community engagement and commitment.
DuraSpace revenue streams were diversified in 2013 with 70% increase in sponsorship support. This comes a moment when the community is aware that DSpace is more than ten years old and in need of modernization. This process is already far along with the development of Fedora 4. Fedora fundraising took off in 2013 as excitement about the re-architecting of the product was leveraged by the leadership of the steering group. She noted that 188 DSpace and 21 Fedora repositories were added in 2013 to point out that the global use of these platforms continues to increase. A key issue in 2014 will be to shift sponsorship/membership support to reflect the geographic use of DSpace in particular.
Establishing project steering groups for Fedora, DSpace and VIVO in 2013 was a key accomplishment. The steering groups are at different stages of development but the trajectory is to tightly engage stakeholders by connecting fundraising and project governance to community participation in project leadership.
She noted that DuraSpace services successes in 2013 included the launch of DSpaceDirect aimed at smaller institutions who need preservation and archiving of their content, the integration of DuraCloud with Archive-It so that in the future computer services could be run on arc files in the cloud providing an opportunity for ongoing analysis, Net Plus I2 partnership with general adoption and availability as a way to expand connections with university CIOs, and the recent Chronopolis integration which will become a DPN node.
