Leadership Group Members
LYRASIS attendees
The represents who will be taking notes for a given meeting. It rotates after each meeting to the next person in the attendee list.
*Members of DSpace Steering Group
Meeting time: 4PM-6PM UTC
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Meeting ID: 502 527 3040
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Agenda
# | Time | Item | Information | Who |
---|---|---|---|---|
1 | 5 min | Welcome |
| Kristi Park |
2 | 25 min | DSpace 7.x Development Report | Update on the current status of DSpace 7 development and the forthcoming beta versions.
| Tim Donohue |
3 | 5 min |
| Maureen Walsh | |
4 | 5 min | Working and Interest Group Reports | Kristi Park (chair, Governance Working Group) Scott Hanrath (chair, Product Visioning Working Group) Jenn Bielewski (chair, Marketing Interest Group) | |
5 | 10 min | Financial and Fundraising Report | Report shared in Google Group reflects info as of May 31, 2021. Full-year financials available later in July.
End-of-year appeal sent to US, Canadian and select non-NA members.
SCOSS Update | Kristi Park, Michele Mennielli |
6 | 10 min | Promotion of DSpace 7.0 | Presentation of Marketing Interest Group ideas for promotion of DSpace 7 | Jenn Bielewski |
7 | 40 min | Discussion: DSpace 7 Promotion | Leaders will break into 4 randomly assigned groups to further discuss promotion of DSpace 7. Each group will be tasked with brainstorming ideas; identifying resources and challenges for activities; and identifying how they can contribute. We will take 25 minutes for breakout discussions and then return for 15 minutes to report out and discuss with the whole group. Guide for breakout discussions:
| Kristi, Jenn, all |
8 | 10 min | Elections and Governance Roles | Looking ahead to the next (final) meeting of the governance year and preparing for next year.
| |
9 | 5 min | Any other business, as time allows |
|
Kristi opened the meeting.
Tim gave an update on the release of DSpace 7.0 and the next steps after it.
DSpace 7 had a lot of visibility at OR2021, and the official release date (August 2) was announced during the conference. The developers have been internally working for July 26, which is a week before the announced deadline. There are still a few high-priority tasks that need to be completed. Currently the work is slightly off-track for July 26, but will definitely be ready by August 2. Tim has already been working with Jenn on planning the marketing efforts for 7.0, including new videos.
As noted in the previous discussions, DSpace 7.0 will be missing a number of features that were available in previous versions. These will be added in the forthcoming versions, starting from 7.1. The prioritization of missing features has been done based on a survey conducted with Leadership members a few months ago. The features have been divided into five tiers, and even within each tier they are ranked. After 7.0 has been released these will be structured to releases.
The developers have agreed to a plan to issue a new 7.x release once a quarter. These will have strict deadlines, and the order of implementation for features will be based on prioritization. Some features have already been estimated, others will be soon. In addition to features each of the releases will also include bug fixes and code restructuring. Some releases may have more of these than the others. There will be documentation available which will help the organizations to decide when to upgrade.
There were a couple of questions about the release timeline and how easy it is to predict which version will include certain things. Tim noted that Tier 1 will be done first, then Tier 2, unless there are some big tasks that need more work that can be done at that point or if there are tasks that are connected to each other. It’s hard to say for sure at which point all of the missing features will be completed, as this depends on funding and the amount of developer time that is available. So far there’s a promise of funded development up to 7.1. This is something that the DSpace governance will have to discuss later on.
As in the past, it will be possible to skip versions in upgrading to the latest version of DSpace.
Kristi thanked Jere, Beate and Agustina for their help in creating the prioritization.
Maureen provided an overview of recent DCAT activities.
DCAT did a lot of work with the DSpace 7 testathon, helping to set up the tasks, with announcements and with actual testing. Overall, testathon was a success. DCAT was also involved with the planning of DSpace events at OR2021, including the Repository Rodeo session.
In addition, DCAT has been working on DSpace 7 documentation. Among others, DSquare Technologies has done a lot of work with DSpace documentation. It was agreed that the DSpace 7 documentation should be in the public wiki (as in the past) so that the developers can easily update it.
Kristi reported that the governance working group hasn´t had meetings, but their recommendations on a new governance year ending at the end of October will be implemented. This means that the 2020-2021 Leardership group will have one more meeting by October.
Scott reported that the product visioning working group has conducted structured interviews with three service providers. The work will continue with national groups and other service providers.
Jenn informed that the marketing working group has been meeting twice a month. One meeting is devoted to general DSpace issues and the other one on DSpace 7. The group is also discussing updates to the website and social media. There are plans to launch of a new DSpace Digest in mid-August, and the group is also working on annual DSpace report.
Kristi presented the DSpace financial report, which had been sent to the Leadership members beforehand. The current report is until the end of May, so it´s still missing the last month of the budget year. According to the report there were USD 22.000 left in net assets, which means that the project was in a pretty good shape. DSpace was ahead in on membership income, but behind in fund-raising. Not all of the development for 7.0 had been invoiced yet. The net assets will be used to pay for development first before using line of credit.
A fundraising e-mail has been sent to North-American DSpace members and select number of other organizations. Kristi noted that he Texas Digital Library will make their decision on additional support for DSpace 7 development in August.
Kristi informed that LYRASIS has been working with SCOSS and new information about this should be publicly available day now.
Jenn gave an overview of the planned promotional efforts for DSpace 7 and DSpace in general. Once 7.0 is out, there will be a press release which will be sent to the Google groups and social media. The web site will also be updated to include DSpace 7 information and links to other resources including videos.
The planned DSpace Digest will include DSpace news, interviews, case studies and information on what's next for DSpace. There are other ideas as well. The frequency of publication will be decided once it is known how much content there will be.
There were questions about the distribution channels and target audience for the Digest. If it is mainly disseminated to the known DSpace users, how can we reach new people? It was agreed that the Digest should be publicly available on the web and it should be advertised via social media channels.
There was also discussion on the number of early adopters of DSpace and whether we already know about their plans. It was noted that if there are only a very small number of early adopters, it may not be realistic to build a promotional campaign around them. It was argued that small repositories would be more likely to upgrade early as they don’t necessarily have resources to as much customization as some of the big organizations have done. There may also be new users that don’t need any of the missing features from past versions. Susanna reported that as a service provider 4Science has already been discussing the adoption DSpace 7 with their clients: at the moment all of them would like to wait and see until the release of DSpace 7.0 to see how it works for them.
The discussion on DSpace marketing efforts was continued in three breakout groups (see the notes for each of the groups: #1, #2, #3). There was a wrap-up with further discussion after the breakout groups. Some of the points that came up were:
It was agreed that the marketing group should be able to develop these ideas further and come up with a more concrete plan on how to move forward with promotional efforts.
The calendar invite for the last meeting of this group will be sent out soon. The elections of the new Leadership group will take place by October and the new governance year starts in November. Kristi mentioned that she will be stepping down from the Leadership chair position and Maureen will be stepping down from the DCAT chair role.
Kristi ended the meeting by noting that the DSpace-COAR MoU will be discussed in the next Leadership meeting.