Meeting Information

Date and Time: March 25, 2025, 16:00-17:00UTC

Meeting link: See calendar invitation

Attendees

• Pascal-Nicolas Becker 
• Andrea Bollini (4Science) 
• Lieven Droogmans 
• Jyrki Ilva 
• Pierre Lasou 
• Agustina Martinez-Garcia 
• Ianthe Sutherland 
• Dirk Verdicchio 
• Isabel Bernal 

Ex-Officio:

• Tim Donohue 
• Holger Lenz 
• Maureen Walsh 

  Note taker

Apologies

Maureen Walsh 

Erica Johns 

Agenda

Notes

Context and Background

• We move ahead with the assumption that the merger is happening and work on the basis of that assumption

Strategic Vision Development - Presentation

• Holger presented on a framework for developing a Strategic Vision for the merger
• Access the presentation here

Strategic Vision Development - Discussion

• The group discussed topics pertaining to the strategic approach to the merger
• It was suggested that while the framework presented by Holger is thorough, it likely exceeds the time commitment allowed to this group
  • Some of the work in this framework, such as information gathering from stakeholders, may have to be done at a later time; some of it can be done now
• Many DSpace-CRIS users already think of themselves as part of the DSpace community. In their mind, there is no (clear) distinction
• A central question is: "What would it mean from a strategic point of view to have different use cases?"
• The group expanded the discussion around governance structures
  • Can we envision a governance model that includes minority institutions, less financially powerful institutions?
• It was noted that there is disparity in the community between large research institutions and small repositories, such as archives
  • For the average repository, the process can be quite intimidating
  • Smaller repositories are not well represented
  • What large institutions want is usually not what smaller repositories with low resources are interested in 
• We need to take into account different use cases and the diversity within the community
  • We are observing a diversification of use cases (e.g. Indian court system) 
  • Crucial for further development: structure where these kind of things can exist side by side and not in opposition of each other
  • How do we structure the community in a way so that we don't lose anyone?
  • As we make the functions or what is in the community bigger (through a merger), we are increasing the community and are bloating it; need to have a strategy on how to deal with that
• The advantage of DSpace over other systems is that it is "turn key" - that's why most institutions like it
  • We should be careful to pursue a strategy that sacrifices the turn key approach
    • Modularization could be an issue this way
  • DSpace-CRIS is not DSpace: if all the users of DSpace-CRIS all of a sudden overwhelm the community, some may get lost
  • Prefer flexibility over modularity, so that people can use this fantastic model of entities which is in DSpace right now
• It's important to understand why institutions move to DSpace-CRIS
  • Isabel noted that her institution moved to -CRIS because of the need to use entities, not for institutional or strategic reasons
  • Dirk added that they had a publication repository that didn't suffice and needed a CRIS system, so they chose DSpace-CRIS
  • Lot of institutions go for CRIS systems, if they go for another system, they don't need DSpace 
• The name DSpace-CRIS is misleading nowadays
  • It was appropriate 20 years ago, but not anymore
  • DSpace-CRIS has followed the open-source approach against commercial software from its beginning
  • What is really a CRIS system now in DSpace-CRIS is the analytics part
  • We may be making things much more complicated than they actually are
  • The DSpace Community is already made up of DSpace-CRIS, several DSpace-CRIS users are already DSpace members
• The biggest thing to come out of this group is trying to clarify what DSpace-CRIS is
  • It's mostly about adding new statistics. DSpace stepped into the CRIS realm with DSpace 7, has now become a basic CRIS system
  • Therefore the name -CRIS is a bit misleading
  • The community doesn't understand what DSpace-CRIS is, what the actual differences of these products are 
• It was noted that there are differences between DSpace and DSpace-CRIS
  • DSpace-CRIS is coming with a lot of stuff ready to go that you need for CRIS, entity types, filter things, conceptual things and fine control 
  • We need to somehow remove the fear of a merger
  • We need to think about a way to make this simple enough for everyone
  • For the whole community, it's not important what features there are
• The group noted that an increasing understanding of "CRIS" in the DSPACE CRIS today is one that envisions repositories as open Access repos and research portals
• The group revisited the topic of an "inflated" DSpace
  • The more code there is in DSpace, the more code there is to support, bug fix, etc. 
  • The bigger the code base gets, the more challenging the part of volunteer contributions becomes
  • Suggestion: create governance where there is a core that is well maintained, and things on the peripheries that are independently maintained, not necessarily by Lyrasis
    • This suggests a different kind of governance structure; how do we structure it so that it's not being overpowered by one institution's context
  • As we grow the core, we alienate all those other diverse members of the community
  • It was noted that while the inflation argument is important, it is not necessarily relevant for the discussion at the moment
  • Code complexity is not a problem specific to DSpace-CRIS merger. Every release of DSpace adds new code, and makes things slightly more complex.  We should solve this, but this is separate from the DSpace-CRIS merger discussions, as it's an existing issue.  That said, this group could make a strong recommendation that Steering needs to discuss (in a future working group) a solution to code complexity/growth.
• Question: Are we truly increasing complexity that much through a merger?
  • Answer: with every feature we add, we add complexity
  • In the past, we have been growing DSpace, without providing difference in level of support based on feature
  • If we keep making it bigger, we make the challenge bigger for ourselves
  • Faster speed of development in reviewing something; if an institution suggests something in DSpace-CRIS, 4Science can act quicker
  • If we organize our governance and community in a different way and allow subgroups of governance to coexist, we could avoid this endless inflation of DSpace
• We discussed the idea that the challenge and opportunity of a merger is within the arrival of entities in DSpace
  • They bring a lot of flexibility, but are right now more of a promise than a fact; lot of features that are needed to truly use and empower entities are not entailed in DSpace out of box

Conclusion/Next Meeting

• The group will proceed with beginning its work on the Strategic Vision document at our next meeting

Action Items

• Type your task here, using "@" to assign to a user and "//" to select a due date