2018-09-05 DSpace Leadership Group Meeting

Date

05 Sep 2018 at 10:00am EDT

Attendees

• Pascal-Nicolas Becker (The Library Code) 

• Allen Bell (University of British Columbia Library)

• John Butler (University of Minnesota)

• David Corbly (University of Oklahoma)

• Lieven Droogmans (Atmire)

• Federico Ferrario / Roberto Suardi (Cineca)

• Scott Hanrath (University of Kansas)

• Barbara Hirschmann (ETH Zurich)

• Jyrki Ilva (National Library of Finland)

• Salwa Ismail (Georgetown University)
• Inba Kehoe (University of Victoria)

• Pierre Lasou (Université Laval)

• Agustina Martinez Garcia (University of Cambridge)

• Joao Mendes Moreira (Foundation of Science and Technology Portugal)

• Susanna Mornati (4Science)

• César Olivares (CONCYTEC)

• Kristi Palmer (Indiana University Purdue University Indiana)

• Kristi Park (Texas Digital Library)

• Jordan Piščanc (University of Trieste)

• Beate Rajski (Hamburg University of Technology)

• Maureen Walsh (The Ohio State University Libraries)

• Andrew Weaver (Washington State University Libraries)

• Tim Donohue - DuraSpace 

• Michele Mennielli - DuraSpace 
• Kristi Searle - DuraSpace
• Erin Tripp - DuraSpace

The  represents who will be taking notes for a given meeting. It rotates after each meeting to the next person in the attendee list.

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Agenda

Notes

1) New Leaders Introduction

The Leadership Group welcomes to new members: Beate Rajski from Hamburg University of Technology for the DSpace Consortium Germany and César Olivares for CONCYTEC. Both introduce themselves.

Beate Rajski: Hamburg University of Technology is DSpace user since 4 years now, using it for an Open Access repository. As we are using JSPUI and wanted to use ORCID we decided to move to DSpace-CRIS. We are now going to include research data and research information into our repository. While using an open source software, we always look on what we can give back to the community. Therefore we were very happy when Pascal Becker proposed to form a German Consortium and became a founding member of it.

César Olivares: I’m César Olivares from CONCYTEC. CONCYTEC is a governemant Body in Peru. We are member of a network of South American repositories that implemented the Driver guidelines and is going to implement the OpenAire guidelines. We’re running repositories in Peru base on DSpace, 120 of them on version 5, 30 of them on other versions. I was asked to bring three priorities to the meeting the other Leaders did in the last meeting: We are really looking forward to DSpace 7 and is important for us that we get a good release on time. Our second priority is that DSpace gets a good support for ORCID and becomes compliant with OpenAire 4. While saying it, I have in my mind the the OpenAire 4 guidlines are still being written. My third priority would be anything that helps for CRIS Entities in DSpace 7. 

Salwa Ismail welcomes both to the DSpace Leadership Group.

2) Chair and Steering Group

Salwa Ismail is happy that she can continue her work as chair of the DSpace Leadership group. 

Nine members of the Leadership group applied for a chair on the Steering Group:

• Sala Ismail from Gerogetown University
• João Mendes Moreira from FCCT
• Lieven Droogmans from Atmire
• Suardi Roberto from CINECA
• Jyrki Ilva from National Library of Finland
• John Butler from University of Minnesota
• Maureen Walsh from Ohio State University Library
• Susanna Mornati from 4 Science
• Pascal Becker from The Library Code

Salwa Ismail and Michele Menielli: As we have nine seats and nine candidates we do not need to vote on this. The Leadership Group will meet every four weeks. All members of the Steering Group are members of the Leadership Group and will be part of the Leadership Group Meetings. They furthermore meet all four weeks as Steering Group only the nine of them, in between of the Leadership Group meetings. Following the Steering Group members have meetings every second week.

Michele Mennielli: The term for a membership of the Leadership Group is 3 years. As DuraSpace wants to have some continuity in the Steering Group, three of nine seats in the Steering group should be voted for three years. That means that every year 3 sets will be filled with new members for the next year, three seats are taken by people that were voted a year before and remain for another two years (unless they are voted to Steering again) and three people were serving two years in Steering already and will have another year until they have to leave Steering or be voted again to Steering. As we have a completely new Steering Group this year, we should decide who is on Steering for the next year, for the next two years and who for the next three years. From next year on, people will be nominated for a three year term.

Salwa Ismail proposes to the Leadership Group that from next year on people representing Service Providers should not be members of the steering group. That would mean that the Three people representing Serivce Providers would be part of the Steering Group for one year.

Jyrki Ilva would like to serve for maybe one or two years, as he has been serving already previously in the Steering group. In his opinion, it is very useful to have Service Providers in the Steering group as they do a lot of work for the project.

Lieven Droogmans explains that as the Leadership Group is not meeting so often, it is not so close to the day to day work. Currently 80% of the work for Dspace 7 is done by two service providers. Would it make sense to have them in the Leadership Group but not in the Steering group?

Kristi Park agrees to have Service Providers represented in Steering. Maybe it is a good idea to give the persons that have been for some time in Steering the chance to rotate out sooner and let the new members serve longer periods.

Salwa Ismail proposes to put the Service Providers on different terms to always have at least one in the Steering Group.

Erin Tripp reminds that the seats in the Steering Group cannot be guaranteed to Serivce Providers as the seats are a matter of votes. 

Susanna Mornati  suggest to decide later on the terms of the Steering members. The Steering group was just formed and haven’t met yet for the first time. She suggests to take some time to see how it is working out before deciding on this matter. She notices as a curious remark that most of steering members are coming from Europe.

César Olivares asks if there are any disadvantages to have Service Providers on Steering?

Salwa Ismail explains her idea: While the Service Providers are doing important work for the Community, Salwa would like to avoid a situation where different Service Providers would like to lead the community into different directions. She doesn’t want anyone to get the idea that DSpace is steered by commercial providers instead of the community itself and prefers to have people working on repositories, coming from museums or libraries in the Steering group. But maybe the service providers representatives are just one voice and one perspective. 

Lieven Droogmans says that he tried to always bring the perspective of Atmire’s clients and not of the Atmire itself into Steering. Therefore differences between opinions of Service Providers and museums or libraries may not be so huge.

Michele Mennielli says on the view DuraSpace that Service Providers are doing a tremendous work, so they need to have a role in the governance. DuraSpace decided to offer the Service Providers of the partner tier a seat in the Leadership group and talked about a seat in Steering. DuraSpace decided not to mention any limits for anyone to be voted to steering, because that is the decision of the Leadership Group and not up to DuraSpace. That said of course Michele shares the concerns of Salwa that the project should not appear to the community to be influenced by commercial vendors. In the past everyone worked on the same goal: to make DSpace great. This year it is more complicated. As there are only nine candidates there will be no real votes. With this in mind it may difficult to explain why three of nine members in the steering group are representing Service Providers. But they do not represent their companies only, they do represent their clients as well and they are very active members of the community.

Salwa Ismail summarize that for now all three Service Providers will be part of the Steering group. She thanks Lieven Droogmans for pointing out his point of view and Susanna for proposing to postpone the decision. First steering meeting will be in two weeks. She would prefer that someone else is chairing the Steering Group so that the Steerer’s chair and she can work together.

Michele Menielle points out that not all steerers are present in the meeting today. Salwa and he will prepare the next Steering group’s meeting and the chair should be voted there.

Lieven Droogmans proposes that the chair should not be a representative of a Service Provider.

3) DSpace Budget

Erin Tripp present the current budget for DSpace. The membership drive has been terrific for this year. For the first time since several years DSpace reached its goal for the membership campaign. The budget is at $259,901 for 2018. That’s 106% of the membership campaign goal. This could be an opportunity to allocate more of Tim Donohue’s time on DSpace as it was discussed several times before. With DSpace 7 we are at a crucial point where it would be great to be able to use more of Tim’s time. In the past Tim has bin working on DSpace between 70 and 75% of his time. Erin proposes to raise that to 90% for the rest of 2018. For the for coming months this would cost approx. $15,000. The DSpace’s budget would still have a good income of ~$40,000 that can be saved or spend by the Leadership group. She proposes to send an E-Mail to all Leaders, asking them to vote with either +1, 0 or -1, following the rules of the Apache community. In the past there have never bin a chance to build a budgetary reserve.

Salwa Ismail thanks Michele for helping to achieve this year’s membership campaign goal.

Pascal Becker says that he is happy to finally hear that more of Tim Donohue’s time can be allocated to DSpace. As Tim is hired by DuraSpace for 100%, Pascal would like to know what Tim’s tasks have been within the remaining 25-30% of his time and what would happen to them.

Erin Tripp answers that in preparing this proposal DuraSpace was looking on how they could reallocate these tasks to other staff and that that would be possible. For 2019 the Leadership Group would still need to decide how much Time would be allocated to DSpace, but other staff would are available to pick up Tim’s tasks beside the DSpace project itself.

Lieven Droogmans wants to know why we don’t acquire 100% of Tim’s time?

Erin and Tim point out that the remaining 10% would be needed to transfer knowledge and to onboard DuraSpace’s staff on the other services and tasks that Tim was working on. In 2019 it would be possible to acquire 100% of Tim’s time for DSpace.

Salwa Ismail says that having Tim working 100% of his time on DSpace would be very helpful with regard to the priorities that Leaders specified in the last meeting. But she also asks if this decision would tear the Leadership Group to acquire Tim’s time by 100% in 2019?

Erin Tripp assures that this is not happening but would bring DSpace in a good position to do so. While it is great to have options, the proposal is specific to 2018 and everything else would have to be decided when the Leadership group will discuss the budget for 2019 which is planned for the coming fall. She will send out a vote to be answered until Tuesday next week. 

Pascal Becker proposes to use Slack instead of E-Mail. Michele points out that some Leaders are still not using Slack. Erin reminds that DSpace is using Slack on a free plan and therefore has no archive, while E-Mails to the group’s list are archived. Pascal withdraws his proposal to use Slack for votes.

4) LG and what now? 

Salwa Ismail thanks to Susanna for providing a spreadsheet summarizing the priorities specified by the Leaders. She asks how the Leaders would like to continue working on those.

Lieven Droogmans suggests to look out on how other projects of DuraSpace are weighting votes in such cases.

Pascal Becker recommends letting the steering group prepare something for the Leadership group. While it would be hard to discuss the priorites with more than twenty Leaders at the same time, it would be easier to do this in a group of nine Steerers. He would let the Steerers decide if they come up with a list of priorities they want the Ledership group to vote for or against it of whether they just proposes a way weight and rank the priorities. Susanna Mornati’s spreadsheet is really helpful and she did a great job, but as she pointed out within the spreadsheet it is still unweighted.

Michele Mennielli asks to consider that while Steerers has to prepare decisions and actions of the Leadership group they still have to do this on the ground of the community’s priorities. With 23 members in the Leadership group it would be always possible to form Working Groups beside the Steering Group to work focused on special issues. Fedora was using the idea of Working Groups lately. In general, he agrees with Pascal Becker that moving forward with the list of priorities could and should be prepared by the Steering group. 

Pascal Becker replies that the number of Working Groups are still limited as every Workin Group needs to get resources from DuraSpace, for example time of Tim of Michele or other staff of DuraSpace. Therefor the Leadership group should decide which issue is worth a Working Group and which has to be postponed depending on the community’s priorities.

Susanna Mornati points out that she had to merge several priorities together and simplify them to get to a spreadsheet that gives an overview. She asks everyone to not take the list for granted, but to check if it represents everyone’s priorities correctly. She will update the spreadsheet to include the priorities of the two new Leaders Beate Rajski and César Olivare. 

At the end of the meeting Salwa Ismail recaps that Michele Mennielli and she and me will setup the next meeting of the Steering group and the next meeting of the Leadership group. The Steering group can discuss the points how to move forward with the priorities may prepare something for the Leadership group’s meeting in October. Erin Tripps says that she will prepare information about DSpace’s budget of the next four months for the next meeting of the Leadership group.

ACTION ITEMS

Salwa Ismail , Michele Mennielli : Send a doodle for the next meeting of Steering groupand prepare that meeting.

Salwa Ismail , Michele Mennielli: Prepare and invite to the next meeting of the Leadership Group in October.

Erin Tripp Send out vote about the allocation of Tim's time to DSpace.

Erin Tripp : Prepare information about DSpace’s budget for the next four months (rest of this year).

Steering Group: Discuss how to move on with the community’s priorities