(Kristi, rec)
What did you hear?
Good wonderful news about the sustainability
Good project updates
Support for fedora and uptick in revenue
Progress on VIVO
International adoption, funding a concern
As a board member, shift to membership in response to membership (especially international orgs)
Emphasis on community engagement but engagement came out in each project as organic
Membership model
- How does this work for new/incubated projects?
- Incubation seems like the future of DuraSpace
- If you don’t have a ton of money, what can you do?
- DSpace/Fedora/VIVO are at different levels of maturity
- Some projects are global (DSpace) others are not (VIVO)
- We should only have 3 membership levels
- One-size-fits-all might not work
- Small institutions that cannot afford high sponsorship levels will not have governance opportunities
- DSpace has many more bronze sponsors than Fedora
Governance and cross-collaboration
- Lots of opportunities
- Where do project users talk to each other?
- If all 3 projects want to do something similar, how do you distribute funding?
- Facilitating cross-collaboration
- Steering committee can make decisions about collaborations
- DuraSpace initiated pushes to collaborate
- Collaborative grant applications
- Addressing interoperability for federal grants
What inspires you?
Pleased that the organization can work on technical, fiscal, and marketing
Diversity of institutions
Very active communities in all the projects good synergies
The organization has existed for 12 years without a board
I'm inspired in the increase in funding.
Happy with the discussion of governance.
Don't screw it up.
VIVO
- $200,000 annual conference
- Crosswalks with repositories
- Existing standards that can be applied to other systems
- Sharing VIVO data with other platforms
- Appeals to researchers/faculty
- They care about their profile
- Provides benefits to researchers
DSpace
- Vision
- International penetration
- Native support for international languages
What concerns you?
Where does DuraSpace put its foot print?
Fedora and VIVO run by one or two larger institutions, DSpace more organic, different challenges
DSpace has a large community but smaller revenue – Asia and Latin America large users but don’t contribute $ proportionate to their use.
How many large institutions are running both DSpace and Fedora, emphasis on heavy lifting on Fedora.
Heavy duty testing and development in DSpace has dropped off.
Concerns about membership model because it precludes some of the institutions with fewer resources, could larger institutions with greater resources sponsor smaller institutions or those with fewer resources – goes to the goals of sustainability.
Other International memberships based on your ability to pay.
Greater range below the $2500 sponsorship/membership levels
Membership model crucial to sustainability
We could get ourselves too distracted by process that it impedes progress
Need to quit talking about “hackfest” – better language – sounds illegal
How to coordinate with research data models (CERIF)
European institutions (and some NA institutions) use CERIF (EuroCRIS) data model
Is VIVO coordinating with CERIF?
How do we address OSTP mandate?
Mandate storing data sets or links to data sets
- Too large to store locally
- Already stored elsewhere
What questions would you like answered?
How will membership be supported?
Will there be consortial pricing?
Sponsorships are paid for by groups who want their organizations associated with something, how can this be included in the membership model?
How can people outside North America be included?
How can we provide a low cost membership?
How would this distinguish between fiscal and in kind contributions?
DSpace communities in Africa, have an FTE but no money, could there be a membership class where only an FTE contribution is required?
Coordinating between projects
- Alex Viggio: Stuart was talking about his feature list for DSpace. Maybe VIVO should act more collaboratively with the other DuraSpace projects.
- David Lewis: To what extent is each individual project a niche? If there's too much overlap, they start to overlap.
- Paul C.: If there's overlap, you start to impose standards on the others, which would be a problem.
- Julia Trimmer: need opportunities for people from different projects to work together.
- Who at the project does this? Someone should keep an eye on these questions?
- Susan Lafferty (not a VIVO site): From what I've heard, I'm concerned about maintaining the ontology consuming too much time rather than developing the software. This is because ontologies become life's work.
Different membership levels
- Susan: I think if you have several memberships in several projects, it should add up to a higher level membership in DuraSpace.
- Paul C.: I agree. Giving a little money to all three projects feels wrong if you're only at the bronze level.... Having a tight link between contributors and individual institutions' needs makes sense.
- Lower level of membership levels: copper. I’m more partial to amigo or buddy.
- Mike Conlon: we spend 400k on several projects.
- Paul C.: for a lot of DSpace institutions, 5k is real money
- Susan: renewals breed making the same choice
Importance of participation
- Mike: it would be sad if someone just paid the bill; you don't want to be a member, you want to be a participant.
- Bill Barnett: you don't just want people to pay money, because you don't have a community, you don't have feedback.
- David: with Fedora, money-contributing sites tend to commit code, but DSpace committers tend not to contribute site.
Other notes
- Paul C.: the projects are different. For DSpace you might expect a copper level; for Fedora, you expect a diamond contribution.
- David: it seems to me you wouldn't want to cut off anyone who contributes money and wants to select the board.
- Mike: the problem with VIVO is the data. You can't have only some information. This is as opposed to DSpace where institutions can load a site progressively.
- Suggestion to be transparent about how admin overhead within a given project is allocated.
