The Sustainability Working Group (WG) determines the most cost-effective way to deliver ARK services that provide value to the community while keeping the required contribution from the community affordable. It conducts an ongoing conversation in the ARKs-in-the-Open (AITO) community about costs and how they will shape the “minimum viable product” and any additional services. This WG is concerned with long-term organizational and financial stability for ARKs and ARK infrastructure, whatever that will end up meaning precisely, and its work will be cognizant of legal and tax frameworks (eg, non-profit organizations).
A short 2-3 sentence description of why the working group has been formed and what it will accomplish for the project.
Cost analysis. As a starting point, determine the cost categories and totals involved in keeping the current ARK infrastructure (n2t.net resolver included) running, monitored, patched, replicated, and updated with features that keep it interesting to the community. Determine which costs are essential and which costs could be reduced or eliminated if necessary in order to achieve sustainability.
Revenue strategies. Determine ways to bring in income and/or in-kind resources necessary to sustain the service on an ongoing basis, as well as sufficient buffer to maintain it for a year even if the income stopped. Examples include one or more of subscriptions, fundraising events, contributed staff time, tiered memberships, etc. It will be useful to be able to state how these strategies are expected to avoid the problems experienced in 2018 by DPLA and DPN.
Kickoff: clarify objectives and assign roles for the objectives
Month 2: share draft cost analysis and revenue strategies with the AG for early feedback
Month 6: propose revenue strategy and implementation plan
Months 7-12: seed sustainability with early adopters from within the community
Month 12: updated WG objectives and deliverables for the coming year, with an accordingly updated overall AITO roadmap
Global ARK (and other identifiers) resolver, N2T (Name-to-Thing): https://n2t.net
Notes from ARK "Experts" meetings in 2018, with discussions of surveys, ARK spec changes, counting ARKs, sustainability, etc
General WG features common across AITO working groups
A list of existing documents and other resources for reference. Add to this list as content is created by the working group.
Sayeed Choudhury (AG Liaison), Johns Hopkins University
Kurt Ewoldsen (AG Liaison), CDL
List all members, using the wiki @ symbol feature to link their user profile to the document
Teleconferences are generally held twice a month, 16:00-17:00 ET, on the first and third Mondays. Connection details included in calendar invitations.
aito-sustainability-wg@googlegroups.com, archived at https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/aito-sustainability-wg