Notes are public, therefore some documents re. financials are sent out by email only
Conflict of Interest Policy (Maureen)
New Leaders will be asked to complete the conflict of interest form around December 1st, via email from Laurie
Governance
Steering and Vice Chair Elections (Maureen)
Call for nominations from Leadership for two Steering seats and Vice-Chair closes December 1, 2022
If needed, ballot sent to Leadership on December 2nd and due by December 7, 2022
Steering terms are three years, Chair serves a 2 year term, Vice Chair serves a 1 year term
Currently there are already two nominations for Steering seats, no nominations for Vice Chair
Membership benefits
Gold Member Governance Seat Ratio (Maureen)
Steering voted positively to move to a 1:2 ratio for Gold seats beginning with 2023-2024 membership year
Platinum members have an automatic seat, previously for Gold members was 1:2, but Steering decided to go with 1:1.
Now we have enough members to go with the originally planned ratio. All the other programs within Lyrasis have already moved to this model. Also, the group is now already quite big.
Question Beate: Why was this decided by Steering not Leadership?
It was decided by Steering and it now brought to the attention of Leadership to discuss any potential objections.
There are no objections from Leadership
Financials (Laurie)
1st quarter (July 2022-Sept2022) financial report
Budget is a plan; quarterly financial reports provide updates
Overall retained net assets $ 67,603
Does not reflect 7.4 contract labor invoices (approved up to $ 63,000)
Variances include
Negative: revenue from service provider fees and fundraising
Positive: revenue from membership dues; expenses: fringe benefits, travel, and IDC
Will need to accelerate fundraising efforts to continue to support funded development
Comments:
Net assets is like a saving account. Retained net assets is money saved from previous year. Current net assets fluctuate a lot.
Next report will reflect budget figures until December
Question Isabel: are there no rental expenses?
This is included in Lyrasis IDC (Overhead costs borne by Lyrasis)
Question Beate: What about the service provider fees?
Providers have been encouraged to be more engaged with the program. If there is more technical contributions, Lyrasis will give credits on financial contribution. E.g. providers can either contribute technically or financially, but this can still change over the year.
Overall approx. $ 174,000 US pledged over 3 years; approx $ 50k US each year
Effort by SPARC Europe, DSpace has been selected to be part of their 3rd fundraising round.
Goal was to fund 1 junior software developers and 1 product coordinator. So far, we have funded 1 part-time coordinator position from these funds. Currently second year of that work. Some new members in group have joined as part of the SCOSS campaign.
Approx $ 75,000 US in donations and increased membership (most pledged last fiscal year; new pledge thanks to the National Library of Finland)
Funds targeted to DSpace development. Soon sending out a new letter reminidng the community about this opportunity, to catch any end of year opportunities.
7.0 came without full feature parity with V6 because this would have taken a really long time. That’s why we have a tiered list of features. The ranking was decided upon by Governance. Everything marked in green is completed. Yellow is considered for delay. Blue are the ones DSpace is working on for the next release. This means that 7.5 will bring most of Tier 4, e.g. feature parity will soon be reached (probably with 7.6)
Need to discuss if some NEW features from the list should go to DSpace 8.
Question: will all features from 6 there in summer, when support ends for version 6?
Most features yes, except for some features that seem not to be used much. However, these can always be considered for acceleration by contacting a service provider, commenting in the respective issues etc.
Tim explains the funded development model (mainly with Atmire and 4Science). Dspace itself does not have any developers.
Question Barbara: Which features will be moved to the next version, what will be the considerations for a cut-off between 7 and 8?
Tim: Form V8 on, we will once again have a more understandable and easy to use release process (e.g. 1 major release per year, the other ones are bug fixes). DSpace 7 release process is very complicated and fast for many users
Comment Isabel: having a Development Fund is fantastic as it adds constant technological novities but from the user perspective jumping so quickly from one minor version to another version risks to make all of us be lagging behind the most updated version by default. Dot-Release are not “normal” Dot-Releases in V7.
Note that we have not fully funded 7.5.
Comment Isabael re. library budgets: That’s another reason why we want to get to V8 quickly. A standard release once year will help with budget planning as well.
Question Jussi: How and when will we decide on features for Dspace 8?
Some discussions have happened in Steering, but more expected in the first half of 2023. Leadership will be involved. Product Visioning WG has done some thinking and a report. User Groups should also be involved with this process. Leadership could come up with a subgroup.
Great engagement, Q&A document with at least 80 questions per session, a lot of users from Spanish speaking countries (Live Translation was a great success)
It was also a resource-intensive. Can we do something more lightweight with future releases? Can we leverage the momentum for fundraising? Please think about it and share ideas via email or in the next meeting.
Community Event (Kristi, Susanna, Pascal, Eric)
Planning for Spring 2023 Community Event
Kristi: planning for this event has been delayed. Help needed to do this. Schedule meeting after winter holiday.
Susanne: one idea would be to organize something in combination with the OR conference.
Erik Moore: not really defined yet what kind of event we want to have. We do not want to recreate the webinar series. Need to define what we understand as community event. User groups meeting in US and DSpace Praxistreffen are very successful, how can we recreate something like that.
Pascal: Praxistreffen hopefully again an in-person meeting next year. It was online only the last two years. Conference is much more complex to organize. Developers are already overloaded, we cannot ask them again to prepare slides for such an event such as for the webinars.
Laurie: maybe be more open, e.g. putting out call for proposals
Jose: Not only rely on developers for presentations. Promote showcase of DSpace 7 use cases on website, testimonials etc. Rely on community for presenting, for different types of stakeholdes and types of repositories.
Isabel: fostering more knowledge sharing across the community, there are so many repos doing cool stuff. short webinars where they present? or pick up a topic of common interest and invite to exchange views and experience.
Kristi: It may also be useful to have a repeat of any OR presentations in a virtual space where more people can attend
Maureen: in the past, there were already calls to the community for such meetings, combined with Governacne inputs.
Open Repositories (Maureen)
OR2023 June 12-15, 2023, Stellenbosch, South Africa
This is an In-person only conference, there might be some streaming of keynotes, but all presentations are in-person
