Attendees

1. Alexander Berg-Weiß 
2. Arran Griffith 
3. Bridget Almas 
4. Dan Coughlin 
5. Dan Field 
6. Dustin Slater 
7. Heather Greer Klein 
8. James Alexander 
9. Jennifer Gilbert 
10. John Gostick 
11. Jon Dunn 
12. Maria Esteva  
13. Nicole Scalessa
14. Oliver Schöner 
15. Robin Lindley Ruggaber 
16. Rosalyn Metz  ← actual notetaker
17. Scott Prater
18. Terry Reese 
19. Timothy Shearer 
20. Tom Wrobel 

() Indicates Note Taker

Guests

Laurie Gemmill Arp 

Michele Mennielli 

Agenda

Notes:

Alternative Membership Ideas - Consortia

• 2017 conversations with a DSpace provider, but Germany had a consortium but no members
• A DSpace provider started governing the customers together.  
• A consortium was tailored to Germany's needs because of German procurement processes
• university of berlin is the lead organization; they collect the membership from the different institutions; they stand as the communication point between the institutions and the Dspace community; the single institution gives out the benefits to the other institutions; they then nominate their own representative to the governance board and they have a seat because they are platinum+
• they scaled up from a national user group to a member; they essentially represent the entire country; essentially, DSpace is a national infrastructure
• in other countries, and similar conversations happen.  e.g., Poland
• The German consortium members are listed on the website because they match the Dspace tiers
• Alternatively, it could be that the consortium is the only thing listed (and then the members are indicated somewhere); this gives the consortium flexibility with their internal costs and governance
• the consortium itself has governance and is usually highly responsive to requests for information
• collectively, they can participate in governance because they are only paying supporter or copper level of fees and wouldn't be able to participate at that level
• they were all explicitly formed for DSpace engagement
• this also allows for more diversity of representation from other parts of the world, so we aren't so US-focused.

CST Growth Fund

• Slides from Laurie's Presentation
• engaged in purposeful work on the org home and what is expected from Lyrasis for the open-source communities
• funding to support growth for CSTs, because they all have particular needs that are difficult for them to make on their own
• areas that are critical for growth $114,292 over 3 years
  • fedora specific:
    • doing some work specifically around updates on dependencies
    • subsidizing staff changes (promotion for Arran and then Dan for 100%)
    • at the end of the 3 years, the hope is that we will have increased funding for the organization through membership
    • this would also give us a runway to begin conversations about Fedora 8
    • this would change the bottom line of our budget, i.e. that we wouldn't be pulling from our reserve
  • broader CST
    • integration work across the programs
    • the cross-chairs group would guide on this
    • in the first year, they would have to figure out how to handle governance across the communities 
    • then someone from a technology strategic perspective, how would we integrate the technologies and develop a roadmap
• They would like to make this a longer-term process – Lyrasis would need funds for this, but they hope to make it happen.
• Q: Equity of funding:  how do we equitably spread funding for integrations?
  
  • A: Take it a step at a time. We don't know what it will look like; it was more just a commitment made, the nature of which needs to be worked out. The guiding principle is to lift all program boats, not just a few.
    The scope can be broader than just a one-to-one integration for (example, making APIs richer and more open to enable all kinds of integrations)

FY 2025 - 2026 Budget Proposal

• Budget Proposal from Arran (see the report)
  • Reviewed at-risk memberships and made three suggestions: Worst Case Scenario, Sustainability Scenario, Best Case Scenario
  • Confident in the sustainability scenario
  • Net deficit covered by retained net assets
  • The budget in the report does not include the proposed CST growth fund
  • Bridget presented a budget view without Arran's promotion to see how the CST growth fund changes the proposed budget.

Announcements

• Fedora at OR—Dan and Arran are planning to go. The Fedora User Group meeting is on Wednesday afternoon. If folks in this group are going, there may be semi-planned prompts so we have topics to discuss.
• Fedora Camp–Calls for proposals will be coming out soon. We are receiving feedback from institutions planning to attend. The Phaedra community is looking to collaborate with us in any way we can. There is potential for cost sharing. Most of the Fedora users are hosted at the University of Vienna.
• AI Discussion Series Update–Transitioning the monthly conversation to action-oriented working groups. Looking for people to support.
  • writing a white paper
  • finding and identifying venues for publications
  • venues for discussion
  • gathering metrics for assessing and collecting information for advocacy

Technology Update

• The project is being tracked in GitHub: https://github.com/orgs/fcrepo/projects/5/.
  • moving back to the sprint format
  • focusing on code coverage for testing, not all modules need code coverage
  • this is the current sprint: https://github.com/orgs/fcrepo/projects/5/views/7
  • next sprint is April 28th
  • this will let folks know what they are committing to; it's discrete and time-bound.
• More technology support questions are coming into Slack, which takes up developer time.
• We aren't at a point where we can begin to pull in a contractor to help with the dependency work because we first need to finish the code test coverage work.
• Fedora developed "side projects" (migration utils, camel toolbox); we don't have a support policy for these projects and don't focus on ensuring we are updating these. At some point, we should look at what we need to do for these "side projects"

Membership Benefits Discussion

• What can we tie to the membership that makes it more worthwhile for the member?
• Some thoughts from Arran are in the report.