DSpace Federation Governance and Business Planning Julie Walker MIT Libraries July 8, 2005

DSpace transitioned from sponsored to community project Sponsored or spinout project “A sponsor of an internally developed software project releases their code to the public under an open source software license and invites an external community to join the project.” E.g. Eclipse (IBM), OpenOffice (Sun) and Mozilla (Netscape) Community Founded project “publicly initiated by one or more individuals, independent of their employment context, to recruit developers to contribute to software that is still in its infancy” E.g. Linux, Apache, Debian, GNOME (Source: O’Mahony and West, 2004)

Where are we today? Worldwide community of users Variety of ways DSpace is being used Active development and support community Established technical and collaboration infrastructure Emergence of commercial service providers BSD-license for guiding relationships with external commercial entities Copyright co-owned by HP and MIT

Vision DSpace Installations Service Providers /Value-Added Resellers DSpace OSS Community DSpace software Independent developers User sponsored development resources Industry sponsored development resources Service providers using DSpace/ DSpace services user base DSpace Federation MIT U. Cambridge U. Amsterdam HP OCLC ANU Hong Kong U. Sci. & Tech Consulting firm Internet co. Libraries services org. Hardware co. Hosting co. IT Services co. U. Toronto U. Rochester Corporations Government agencies NGOs BioMed Central

Key components to building an open source community Building a collaboration infrastructure Making key decision about licensing and other relationships to external commercial efforts Designing governance mechanisms (Source: O’Mahony and West, 2004)

Why is community governance and business planning important? (And why is it important to start now?) Collective governance and responsibility will strengthen open source community allow for endurance of DSpace beyond the involvement of its founders Community-wide engagement in decision-making process for non-technical issues will be more robust and representative

Proposed Planning Process

DSpace Federation Interim Steering Committee Committee of approx. 8 A neutral chair with expertise in open source governance and related issues One representative each from HP and MIT Representatives from other DSpace installations Representatives from service providers Invited expert(s) on open source governance Guided by project manager/facilitator Charge: Draft a proposal for an inclusive, democratic governance process and business model within the next 9 months.

What kinds of issues will the committee address? What is the DSpace community? Who should own the code? What kind of central governance structure would be useful? What funding is required to sustain any centralized activity and how will that be obtained and managed?

How will the committee’s agenda and decisions be communicated? As in Open Source, an open process Open discussion list (just like DSpace- dev) with archived postings available on Published minutes from any meetings or conference calls Regular input from the community solicited

A quote to leave you with… “Governance was not imposed, but emerged out of shared perceived need.” (O’Mahony and West, 2004)

And a final plea…don’t be a lurker! Technical contributions: Code, QA, documentation, technical support, etc. Non-technical contributions: Host a user group meeting Update content on Contribute to list-serv discussions Liaise with related projects and report back Speak about DSpace at conferences… …and much more!

Reactions? Questions? Concerns?