Contribute to the DSpace Development Fund

The newly established DSpace Development Fund supports the development of new features prioritized by DSpace Governance. For a list of planned features see the fund wiki page.

Date

 11:00 am-1:00 pm EST (Eastern Standard Time)

Zoom:  Link in calendar invite

Leadership Group Members

  • Bridget Almas Lyrasis* (Ex-officio, Lyrasis seat)
  • Anne Aubert, Food and Agriculture Organization of the UN
  • Isabel Bernal Spanish National Research Council CSIC 
  • Andrea Bollini 4Science* 
  • Bill Branan Johns Hopkins University 
  • Kimberly Chapman University of Arizona Libraries 
  • Maggie Dickson Duke University (star)
  • Lieven Droogmans Atmire*
  • Kent Gerber University of Minnesota†
  • John Gostick University of Cambridge
  • Gültekin Gürdal Izmir Institute of Technology**
  • Barbara Hirschmann ETH Zurich
  • Jyrki Ilva National Library of Finland
  • Erica Johns (Vice Chair) Cornell University*
  • Colin Lukens Harvard Library**
  • Lautaro Matas  LA Referencia***
  • Rachel Molina Indiana University Indianapolis
  • Erik Moore (Chair) University of Minnesota*
  • Kristi Park Texas Digital Library*
  • Małgorzata Paszkowska PCG Academia
  • Beate Rajski DSpace-Konsortium Deutschland
  • Julien Sicot EPFL
  • Paschal Ssemaganda World Bank Group
  • Carolyn Sullivan University of Ottawa
  • Ianthe Sutherland University of Edinburgh
  • Maureen Walsh, The Ohio State University Libraries*

DSpace staff attendees

  • Tim Donohue 
  • Holger Lenz 
  • Michele Mennielli 

The (star) 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

** Community At Large Representative

*** Ex-officio member nominated by the Leadership Group as representative of the community at large. Ex-officio members do not have voting rights

† DSpace Community Advisory Team (DCAT) Chair, ex-officio, non-voting 

Agenda


Item

Information / Description

WhoTimeActions Needed
1Welcome, Notetaker

Welcome

Notetaker: Maggie

Erik5 minsN/A
2Consent Agenda

2026-27 DSpace Membership Updates:

  • New members: 
    • McMaster University, Silver (+$5k)
    • Los Lagos University, Bronze (+$2.5k)
    • Qatar National Library, Platinum (+$20k)
    • Scholaris, Gold ($8.33k, prorated, start date: Sept 1)
  • Reductions: 
    • NC State University Libraries has reduced their membership from Silver to Supporter ($5k → $500)
  • Cancellations:
    • Qatar University cancelled their Bronze membership for 2026-27 (-$2.5k)
    • UT Dallas, Bronze membership (-$2.5k)
    • George Mason University, Bronze membership (-$2.5k)
  • Projected: Overall +$26.83k increase over 2025-26 membership budget

Development & DSpace-DSpace-CRIS Merger:  

  • Merger Management Team:
    • Team is actively brainstorming how to unify our two Entity relationship models (DSpace 7 model & DSpace-CRIS model). These brainstorms will be written up in a recommendation document to share with (and get feedback from) Committers and Developers. As previously discussed, these two relationship models should be unified in 11.0.
    • Internal goal of team is to try to decide a plan for "unified" model by end of August.  Currently, we've narrowed down to two options.

DCAT: 

  • Discussed Accessibility issues with contextual tooltips, and the upcoming US Federal requirement and past UX report
  • Informal survey of versions, many using 7 and anticipating a move to 9
  • Discussed topics from Open Repositories conference
  • Discussed moving the Testathon format from a Google Spreadsheet to GitHub
  • Shared and discussed new Glossaries for Program Terms and Technical terms
  • Renewed interest in support and documentation to understand options for Configuration and Customization

Outreach and Engagement: 

  • The DSpace North American User Group Meeting will take place September 28-30, 2026, at Harvard University
  • If you know of events for the Community Events page on the DSpace Website and would like them added, please reach out to Holger
  • Please consider supporting the DSpace Deep Dive webinar series by signing up to present at an upcoming webinar or sharing the initative with others in the community

Partnerships:

LA Referencia and UbuntuNET initiatives are still providing the latest numbers. An update will be shared shortly via email

CST Interoperability Project: 

  • Currently in specification development phase. Draft specifications will be shared by May, finalized in June.
  • RFPs for implementation Phase will be issued summer 2026.

Org Home

  • Bridget submitted Lyrasis Concept Note.pdf to Mellon for a project Advancing Community-led Technologies into a Trusted GenAI Future. We should should hear soon if we will be invited to submit a proposal for the Proof-of-Concept.
  • EDUCAUSE 
    • Lyrasis is co-sponsoring a pre-conference workshop led by Apereo with additional support from Ithaka S&R and Open edX. The goal of the workshop is to produce "a set of CIO-validated action priorities that could reduce adoption risk of open-source, strengthen institutional confidence and inform future funding efforts”.    
    • Bridget will present a poster on AI and the future of Open Source and participate in a panel on Open Source in Higher Education.
    • Primary goal for participating in EDUCAUSE is to raise the visibility of the CSTs with the CIO audience and assess it as a viable venue for future presentations.
    • Bridget's participation is being funded by the Organizational Home Shared Fund
  • The July Organizational Home cross-chairs meeting was held on July 17, 2026. Bridget shared updates on the Interoperability work, the outcomes of the AI Workshop, and the plans for the Mellon Concept Note. Program chairs/vice-chairs shared updates on their programs. Then collectively we discussed the topics of the Organizational Home Shared Fund and the idea of developing an Advisory Board and criteria for welcoming new programs in to the Organizational Home. Meeting minutes will be shared soon.
  • The Lyrasis CST Interoperability project specifications will all be complete by the end of August. Bridget plans on issuing an RFP for implementation of the following specs relevant to DSpace in September: 
Erik5 minsN/A
3Q4/FY26 Financials

DSpaceFY2026.pdf

Overall DSpace had a strong year financially, positive to budget and a continued trend of year-over-year growth in revenue.   This has enabled the program to build up its Reserve Fund, while the Lyrasis CST Growth Fund has facilitated the expansion of the staff. 

Revenue and Expense Summary
Total revenues for the year were $547,778, a positive variance of $11,678.  Total expenses for the year were $403,449, under budget by $111,639.  Total net income for the year was $144,329, a positive variance of $123,317.

The main factors in the revenue variance were greater than budgeted interest income and membership dues, which offset slightly under budget service provider fees. The main reason for the expense variance was the conservative budgeting for a full year of the new Technical Support Engineer position that wasn’t filled until January. Travel expenses were also under budget due primarily to Open Repositories being held virtually.

Grants and Other Investments
$87,840 of DSpace’s personnel salary and fringe expenses were covered by the Lyrasis CST Growth Fund this year.   

Net Assets
As of the close of the year DSpace has:

Development Fund

$1,587.50

Retained Net Assets

$458,207.50

Reserve Fund

$190,000.00

Total

$649,795.00

The majority of the funds in the Development Fund have now been spent on Accessibility improvements. 

Bridget10 minsN/A
4Wiki Update

Update on current wiki, recommendations for future wiki use

Wiki Migration Notes for Governance

Bridget5 minsN/A
5

Elections Updates

Vacant Steering Seat: 

  • Nomination window has closed; Erik is working with the Governance Working Group on next steps

3 Steering Seats becoming vacant as of Nov 1: 

  • Erik will send out call for nominations soon

Regular Election for Leadership Group: 

  • Gold tier: 7 seats available, 8 nominations
  • Silver tier: 4 seats available, 5 nominations
  • Bronze tier: 2 seats available, 2 nominations

Community-at-large: 

  • Nomination phase until Sept 11

Erik

10 minsN/A
6

AI Contributor Policy

Review and discussion of AI Contribution Policy Document

Review and discussion of DSpace Program Value Proposition (relating to the AI Contributor Policy)

Tim, Holger5 minsN/A
7Marketing and Outreach

DSpace 25 Year Anniversary – Ideas?

Development Fund – Ideas?

Other?

Erik, everyone

10 minsN/A
8All Other Business

Consent agenda items that need additional discussion

Other topics?


5 mins
9Break

N/A

N/A

5 minsN/A
10AI Workshop

Session Outline:

  • Quick Stage Setting (10 minutes)
    • Recap the outputs from the Spring AI workshops
    • Activities & developments related to AI
    • Competing priorities
  • ITAV “Catastrophizing” Exercise from Phase III, Preparing for Change: (40 minutes)
  • Discuss and Schedule Next Steps (10 minutes)

AIForLeadershipAug2026.pptx

Shared Workspace


Bridget60 mins

Next steps to develop an action plan for DSpace and AI


 Notes

Compiled by Maggie Dickson


Notes

  • Welcome - this is the last leadership group meeting of the year
  • Consent Agenda
    • Reviewed; no comments or additions
  • Q4/FY26 Financials (Bridget)
    • Nice YoY growth; very positive year end for Dspace
    • Over budget due to m'ship growth, interest growth. Offset small increase in LSP.
    • Spent less on travel (OR was virtual), computer supplies, salary savings
    • Dev fund is nearly depleted at this point due to accessibility work
    • Tech support engineer position is largely subsidized by growth fund; at end of allocated 3 years we will need to determine whether we can take on the additional expense
  • Wiki update (Bridget)
    • Wiki is hosted in Lyrasis Confluence hosted by a 3rd party - Atlassian is deprecating 3rd party hosting so we are proactively migrating our wiki. Currently we're part of a big Lyrasis wiki that is an unmanageably large group of users. The new cloud wiki will be DSpace only
    • Large part of the effort of migrating is decisions on what to migrate, what to archive. Decisions about migrating users. All detailed in the document Bridget has prepared: Wiki Migration Notes for Governance
    • We need to designate a representative(s) to work with Bridget to work on this project. 
    • Plan is also described in document. 
    • Atlassian will provide a mapping file for existing links so that should continue to work, but that will be part of testing. 
    • If folks have had experience migrating wikis, your input would be greatly appreciated. Ideally a couple of people would be helpful - respond to Erik's email if you want to participate.
    • Question: Is leadership membership required for participation? 
      • Up to us to decide but should be someone with a vested interest in the community. Would be helpful to have someone from Governance participating.
      • Steering will be charging the group. They meet on Sept 9 so we need to have names for them to review by that time. 
    • Election updates (Erik)
      • Vacant steering seat. There were some questions re: balloting so that has caused a bit of a delay. Erik is going to meet with Governance separately to get things moving, make sure the election is run in alignment with the operations manual guidance.
      • 3 Steering seats available Nov 1 - Steering is composed of 9 elected individuals, 3 year terms. Membership is not required for election. Erik is getting nominations, will send out ballots.
      • Leadership is a 1 year term. Platinum - guaranteed seat, Gold - 1 for every 2, Silver - 1 for every 4, Bronze - 1 for every 8. 
        • More nominees than seats for Gold & Silver so we will need elections
        • Last year we were in a similar position but went ahead and seated everyone as the extra seats from Gold & Silver filled vacant Bronze seats.
      • Elections will happen before this Leadership term ends, likely in mid-September. 
        • Votes for Steering will happen after new Leadership members are seated so they can participate in the Steering nomination process
      • Community at large nomination is in place until Sept 7
    • AI Contributor Policy (Tim)
      • Purpose is to allow devs & committers to manage/set guardrails around contributions that appear to be either entirely AI generated or greatly contributed to by AI.
      • Tim, Holger, & Lia drafted this policy and they have been circulating it for feedback. 
      • Drafted based on policies from other open source projects (eg Apache Foundation, Mastodon, Fedora Linux) as well as collaboration within Lyrasis.
      • Policy refers to values statement is in attendant document, which is also under review before it is incorporated into the policy doc.
      • High-level policy: AI contributions are allowed but humans must always be accountable, and humans must disclose use/scope of use of AI 
      • Copyright & legal section is designed to protect Dspace; still under development
      • Would like any feedback. Want this policy to be as clear and understandable as possible. 
      • Questions
        • Code review bottleneck is already a problem; this could make that problem even larger? Need to address this 
          • Yes, a human must do the review. Policy goal is to address the onslaught of AI slop coming their way but they could fine tune it eventually to determine how best to use AI in code review. 
          • Idea - identify criteria that AI could use to weigh CRs against.
            • Conceptually seems reasonable but will need to figure out how to make that work on a day-to-day basis. 
          • General agreement that it is a good idea to use AI to simplify process. 
          • Potentially murky area around the use of AI to generate issue description.
            • They will work on clarifying that but they are trying to address how verbose the AI-generated descriptions at issue & PR levels
          • Steering will review/discuss on Sept 9
        • Marketing and Outreach (Erik)
          • Celebrating DSpace's 25th anniversary
            • There is a little funding for this 
            • Small planning group to think about where/how to celebrate & promote DSpace, also gather data and update registries
            • Reach out to Erik if you are interested in participating; Steering will 
            • Ideas
              • Settle on what to call it so we can have branding - 25 years of DSpace in a tagline
              • For development fund - quantifying contributions (?)
              • Infographic for what has been accomplished over the 25 years, translate it into multiple languages. Get testimonies from user communities
              • Could be a way to get the DSpace registry updated, learn more about current user community
              • Quantify the number of items available online globally
              • Talk to very early DSpace contributors/adopters
                • session/panel on history of DSpace
              • Showcasing particular DSpace instances
                • Example: an institution recently updated from v1 to v8 - that's impressive
                • upgrade-a-thon, providing some help to institutions still stuck on older versions
              • progression over time
              • DSpace logo made from a collage of homepage screenshots from different DSpace implementations
              • DSpace chatbot for wiki
              • Where in the World is DSpace? Like Where in the world is Carmen SanDiego, but we highlight all the places around the world that use it
              • Make it an open celebration, collecting and publishing stories, projects, accomplishments..a sort of OA week website but focused on the DSpace community


No notes taken for AI workshop section...

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