 Okay, I think it's about time to get started. Welcome everyone. I'm Cliff Lynch, the director of CNI, and you've arrived at one of the project briefings that is part of the CNI Spring 2020 virtual members meeting. And we're about halfway through now, a two-month virtual meeting that will run till the end of May. There's still lots and lots to come. Today we're going to have a breakout session with quite a number of speakers. Reflecting on the effects and achievements of the merger that took place fairly recently between Lyrasis and Dura Space. This was a highly strategic merger for all of us, I think, because many, many of our institutions and much of our work depends on various things that those two organizations do. It also was, I think, an important milestone in helping to increase the sustainability and robustness of a number of our critical infrastructure elements. So I'm really going to be intrigued to hear about this. I will hand it over in a moment to David Wilcox, who will give an introductory presentation and will sort of orchestrate the panel. When the panel is done, we will take questions at the end. Diane Goldenberg Hart from CNI will moderate the Q&A. There is a Q&A tool at the bottom of your screen, which brings up a box where you can enter questions. Please feel free to put questions in there as they occur to you during the briefing. There's no reason not to queue up all the questions as they occur, but we will try and answer them all at the end of the presentation. So with that, I'll just say I'm delighted to have this panel, and I welcome and thank all of the presenters in advance, and I'll turn it over to David. Great. Thanks very much, Cliff, and thanks to CNI for moving this spring meeting to an online format. I know I've enjoyed being able to attend more of the sessions through webinars and even download the videos of the ones that I've missed. And so as Cliff mentioned, I'm going to be primarily moderating this session, so I'm going to provide a brief introduction here, just setting a little bit of context, particularly for those of you that might be less familiar with DuraSpace or Lyrasys or some of the programs that we work with. And then the focus here really is going to be on Q&A with the panelists, who I'll introduce in just a moment. And then we do plan to leave enough time at the end for questions from the audience, so do feel free to put those questions in, as Cliff mentioned. So the panelists here today are Julia Trimmer from Duke University, Christie Park from Texas Digital Library, Robin Rugober from the University of Virginia, Rosalind Metz from Emory University, and Tim Shearer from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. And each of these representatives work with one or more of the programs that we're going to be talking about here today. So very briefly, DuraSpace was a nonprofit technology organization that existed between 2009 and 2019. And amongst other things, DuraSpace stewarded three open source community-supported programs, and those are DSpace, Fedora, and Vivo. And I'll say a little bit about each of those in a moment. But together, we supported a global community of over 3,000 users of those programs. And so in 2019, DuraSpace merged with Lyrisis. And Cliff mentioned this, but the focus here really was on being able to achieve greater impact and greater sustainability for all of the programs that we work with. So more resources, more programs, but also more expertise by combining the staff of both of those organizations to work together. So I won't read all this, but this is just the mission statement from Lyrisis. It's quite similar to the mission statement that we had at DuraSpace. And so the organizations were quite well aligned from the start here. But there's a great focus, amongst other things, enduring access to our collective heritage through leadership in open technologies, which is some of the things that we're going to be talking about here today. So very briefly, and this really is brief. This is not a product presentation. We're not going to be talking about features or anything like that. I have quite literally one sentence for each of the programs that we're going to be discussing. And I should say too, this is not an exhaustive list of programs that Lyrisis works with. These are just the ones that we could kind of fit into this panel to talk about here today. And so one of them is ArchiveSpace, which is an open-source archives information management application focused on managing and providing web access to archives, manuscripts, and digital objects. DSpace is a turnkey digital repository application. It's open-source. It's free, created by and for libraries all around the world. Fedora is also an open-source repository platform, a little more focused on flexibility and modularity, and also with an increasing focus on digital preservation. Vivo is notably not a repository. Vivo is both open-source software and an ontology for recording, editing, searching, browsing, and visualizing scholarly activity. And finally, Samvera. And I should note here that Samvera has a somewhat different relationship with Lyrisis than the other programs. We may be able to speak to that during the panel session here today. But Samvera is a community of information and technology professionals who share challenges, build expertise, and create sustainable software solutions for digital collections. So I do have some links at the end of the presentation if you want to learn a little bit more about any of these programs. But we're going to move here now to the Q&A portion. So we've prepared a small set of questions that each of the panelists is going to respond to. And then we're going to follow this with audience Q&A. And I think to start us off here for the questions, I'll just call on the panelists so that we're not sort of stepping on each other trying to get to the microphone first. And I'll do this if I can remember to and just sort of alphabetical order by first name. So if you all can remember where you fit in that sequence, that'll help. And if I can remember. So first question, what was the status of your program? And in this case, each of the panelists is going to choose primarily one program to talk about, although for the future questions we may talk about more than one each. But what was the status of your program? And what were your expectations going into the merger? And were those expectations realized? So I think Julia, that makes you first in alphabetical order if you want to start us off. Sure. Thanks, David. Hi, everyone. So I'm the chair of the Vivo Leadership Group and the Leadership Group is the kind of governance, the main governance board for Vivo. So before the merger, the Leadership Group put a list of questions about the merger together and shared them with Lyrasys. And I'm going to talk about three of them. The first was the Leadership Group said Vivo seems to be a rather different kind of entity than other Lyrasys products. Vivo is not strictly a library service. So how does Vivo fit into the Lyrasys product strategy? You know, how do we move forward together? And since then, I've really seen evidence that Lyrasys is planning to expand in ways that will provide opportunities for Vivo. For example, supporting research and research data, Lyrasys wants to move into more global markets as well. And Vivo currently has active implementations in 19 countries. So I hope that we can help with our existing partnerships there. The second question we had was, will the MOU between Duraspace and the Vivo project be honored through 2019? And it was. We will also renew our MOU for fiscal year 21. Third, does Lyrasys understand what Vivo is and how will they support us? And since the merger, I will say that we've worked a lot with leadership in Lyrasys. They certainly are familiar with Vivo's value proposition, and they've already given us a lot of support. So I think over time, we hope to see Vivo more reflected in the mission and vision for Lyrasys. But overall, back when we were talking about the merger, the leadership group really felt strongly that Lyrasys was a great opportunity for Vivo, and that we definitely needed their expertise and help to grow. So thanks. Thanks, Julia. Christie, you're up next. Thanks, David. So I'm Christie Park. I'm the director of the Texas Digital Library and currently the chair of D-Space Leadership Group, which is one of the two main governance groups for the D-Space program. And I'll talk a little bit about the status of D-Space as a community coming into the merger first off. So coming into the merger, we had pretty stable membership. We had some growth in membership between fiscal year 18 and the current fiscal year. We've added more than 30 new members, many of them coming from a large consortium in Germany that we brought in. So we've had good stable membership income, but a number of resource constraints, which I think all of us have been dealing with, and we were certainly dealing with that at the time of the merger. We have one full, at the time of the merger, we had one full-time staff member, Tim Donahue, who was our D-Space tech lead, who was really bearing a lot of the load of coordinating the development and the open-source community generally. And we had only just been able to bring him on something approaching full-time to the D-Space program. He had been working on other Dura-Space projects before that part-time. So for the year or two prior to the merger, the D-Space community had really been looking for ways to raise income and funds so that we could hire additional FTE. So that was a real issue for us and remained so at the point of the merger. The other thing that we were really focused on at the time that the merger took place is D-Space 7 development. This has been going on since around 2016. It's a major rewrite of the D-Space platform to modernize it, bring it in line with the core next generation repository principles, open-air B4, GDPR compliance, really modernize it, make it a competitive repository platform with a new user interface. Very ambitious undertaking that we started with all volunteer coders as we have historically. And so that was putting a lot of pressure and a lot of creating a lot of resource constraints for the community as well. And at the time of the merger, we're really starting to think about how we needed to change the way or adjust the way that we were approaching that development. And then finally, I'll say just about the status of the organization or the program is that like similar to Vivo, D-Space has a global user base. There are 2500 or more, 2500 known installations of D-Space around the world and a large global user base. But a majority of those users are not contributing members to the open source program. And so one of our challenges at the time of the merger and that continues to be is finding ways to convert those users into engaged members of the community. So those are some of the challenges that we came into this merger with. In terms of expectations, I'm going to speak mostly for myself in terms of our expectations coming into the merger. And I'll say one of my expectations is that there would be some level of culture clash and adjustment as the merger took place. And I've been through, you know, corporate mergers and all kinds of things where that's just always the case even under very good circumstances. And this, I think, was a very good circumstance where most of our community could see the benefits in terms of sustainability and scalability of this merger. And yet we're wary of how it would change D-Space's culture, D-Space's community. And secondly, we, because we are a global program, we had a number of members of our governance groups in Europe and Latin America who were not familiar with lyricists. And so that adjustment of building trust between the D-Space community and lyricists took some time. I think another expectation we had is that, you know, the benefits of this merger would accrue to D-Space in some form or fashion, that additional resources, additional expertise would be available to us, that we would be able to think about ways that we could ease the load on our single FTE. And I think that for the most part those expectations were realized. I won't go into detail now on that, though I may have some things to say about it later on. But I will say too that one of the ways that my expectations have been exceeded in this process is just the higher level of CEO level and executive level engagement in energy with D-Space that we have seen that has been really beneficial to the D-Space program as we've tried to raise funds and and make some changes to benefit the program. And I'll stop there for now. Thanks Christy and I believe Robin is next. Yes, thanks David. So our Cubspace, I'll start out by saying that I was one of the people that was in the group who laid out the very first requirements that would become part of those requirements would feed into the creation of our Cubspace. So while I haven't been in governance, I've been watching our Cubspace and UVA adopted it as soon as it was ready to be released. Our Cubspace is a little different from the other programs that have been that are represented on the panel primarily because it was a mature program already part of the lyricist organization. Our Cubspace was primarily expecting I think to work more closely with like-minded community-supported programs coming from Dura-Space. And I really think that the community saw an opportunity to share resources, explore integrations between programs and see what we could learn from one another. As part of this panel I'd interview Laurie Arp who is very deeply involved. UVA has a developer that works on the development team and we've had people often on contribute in different ways to our Cubspace. But I think it's unique in that it was already part of lyricists and I think there was a real I think optimistic look at the possible merger and the opportunities that that would provide. Great, thanks Robin. Rosalind I think you're next. So my name is Rosalind, I'm at Emory University. I'm actually the chair-elect for San Vera so I'm going to speak a little bit about San Vera. So as David alluded to during the intro section, San Vera is different than it's different in many ways than some of the programs that we're talking about here. But in regard to its relationship with Dura-Space it was different in that it was not underneath the larger umbrella organization of Dura-Space. Although I will say that Deborah Hank and Kurtz who at the time was heading up Dura-Space was on San Vera's formally Hydra, San Vera steering for a while and so we did have a really close relationship with Dura-Space. So when the merger between lyricists and Dura-Space was announced I would say that the community was very hesitant about this relationship. At the time we were rethinking governance in that San Vera sort of had no governance. I mean it had governance, it had norms that it was following, but it didn't have really hard governance the way many of the Dura-Space projects did. We were also considering hiring staff. That was something that San Vera even though it is over 10 years old had resisted doing. It was primarily run by its community members. There was no centralized staff sort of helping except for staff at Dura-Space who would help with finances. And as hiring staff we were working toward developing a contribution model. And so San Vera for its first 10 plus years had really run on the idea that we were not going to ever ask you for money. That all we would ever ask you for was your time and your dedication to the project. But if we were to hire staff it really necessitated the need for financial resources coming into the community in a regular fashion. So when the merger occurred we were sort of going through an exercise to rethink all of this. And that is no small undertaking anybody who has been part of a community can say. I mentioned that San Vera is different because it wasn't an umbrella underneath the umbrella of Dura-Space but it's also different in that it is a community of communities. So all of the other projects named here have a single piece of software that they work with that they're responsible for maintaining. And the San Vera community has three, four, five. It always seems like there's another product that works with it. I would say the three most notable are Hyrax which is sort of the flagship application we'll call it. There is Haiku which is a hosting service for Hyrax and other custom San Vera software. And then there's Avalon which is for AV materials. So those products are underneath the San Vera umbrella but they are also their own communities and their own rights. So the needs of Avalon don't actually always mesh with the needs of Hyrax. They don't always mesh with the needs of Haiku and so figuring out how to balance those needs is something that the steering group for San Vera deals with all the time. So we were cognizant that we are very different than some of the other application or other communities that are out there. And we were hesitant because we weren't sure Lyricist truly understood that. And so we found around our expectations being realized I would say our expectations were probably low. And I would say that Lyricist has surpassed us. But it's been a huge learning curve I would say for Lyricist. So as we're discussing hiring of a staff member right now you know there was I think an assumption that the staff member would do a lot of what many of the other community managers similar to David do or each of the existing projects. But really San Vera's community manager would be handling finances and helping to put on conferences and in-person meetings. We have one annual conference a year. We have a virtual conference every year. We have two in-person partner meetings a year. And that's a lot of administrative you know coordination work. And then there's the work around trying to coordinate sprints that we would also be asking for this position to do. And that was some that was kind of a learning curve for Lyricist. I don't think that they realized how much work we do around face-to-face meetings and that those types of relationships. It's still happening. We're still on that learning curve with them. Where they've been I would say very gracious in giving this giving themselves time and giving us time to get to know one another. But we're also cognizant that this relationship probably will need to change in the near future. As Lyricist sort of brings in all of these other communities and tries to bring them closer together and make them work more closely. San Vera will have to come to a decision point of whether or not it will choose to become part of the Lyricist organization or choose to continue down its own path. So I guess I'll hand it over to Tim to talk about Fedora. Hi folks. It's great to be here. Tim Shearer. I'm at the libraries at Carolina. I'm also here as a member of Fedora Steering and Fedora Leaders. But I should mention both Robin and Rosie are as well and are actually chairing. But I'm just going last. So I'm going to clean up here. As you probably know Fedora has been around for quite a long time. Has a significant footprint both in North America and internationally. As often happens when leadership transitions several times over the governance of a project. I think in some ways we were in an array in a renaissance in that a whole new group of folks were starting to look at it. So at the time we were revisiting how how the product is staffed within then Dura space. So like which software developers worked and there was an effort to bring in cross training which was lovely. We were revisiting the community trying to bring in more voices be more inclusive and get more representation and expand. And we did that on all the different levels. So we were looking at membership. How do we bring in different sized organizations with different missions. We were looking at governance. How do we get more representation and voices on governance. We were looking at our international folks and seeing if we could get more international representation and membership and governance. And we were trying to explicitly tie ourselves more strongly to other communities specifically to Zanvera D space and Island Dora with governance. So all that was kind of in train as the merger was coming along. Another thing on the technology side and I mixed metaphors and my colleagues are used to this but I'll go ahead and do it anyhow. Fedora three and earlier was kind of like gardening with soil. And Fedora four was like gardening with hydroponics. You were still making vegetables but you were going it with a completely different infrastructure. And as it turned out it was really hard if you're used to having a soil based agriculture to switch to a hydroponic agriculture. And so there was a huge jump folks were having to make to get from three to four. And a lot of people were kind of afraid and wondering why they should do that. So another thing that I think was going on was a realization that we inadvertently in an exciting and great way kind of chose a whole different way of doing business. And so in Fedora five and now six what we were looking to do is to knit those back together. So all gardeners could use Fedora. And I think that we're relatively successful in that there was some mild reputational damage I think during that period too that everyone was working on repairing. So to me that's the context in which the merger began. I don't think I have much new to say about the merger or what we were expecting but questions about the membership model the community or communities the cultures within those the autonomy of Fedora inside that the autonomy of governance what kind of staffing models who wouldn't wouldn't be able to work on the Fedora projects. And even down to the more banal alignment of schedules and meetings we had our own cycles of schedules and meetings and lyricists did. So all those things were popping up. And so what we did know is that Fedora had a great community and great leadership and a great staff and so we were hopeful and I think we found at least so far that some of those things that we could have worried about are really not to be worried about right now. So with that I'll kick it back to David. Great thanks Tim. So on the next question really just kind of wondering what impacts either positive or negative the merger has had on the programs that you work with. And so you know we don't have to necessarily have everyone speak about the exact same programs I think it's just whatever is most relevant to you as we as we go through. But Julia if you'd like to start us off again and we can just keep the same order. I'm sure. So we in Vivo kind of took advantage of the merger to do a program assessment and I think all of the other aerospace programs did as well but it was really helpful for Vivo and enabled the leadership group to clarify the most important priorities that we had. Our project director Mike Conlon was ready for a transition. Where's this and this assessment process helped us through that. We began and completed and it takes a village assessment with Lori Arvin, Megan Forbes that helped us take a fresh look at all aspects of the project and in terms of sustainability. I think the leadership group really has a much better understanding of the project now and I would say that everybody is more engaged or was more engaged before the pandemic hit. And then I'll just add that I'm looking forward to seeing some kind of coordinated communications strategies and updated branding for the Dura space community supportive programs but but I realize that takes time. So that's it for me. And I'll add from the D space perspective I think the greatest positive impact for us has been not terribly surprising but the greater size and breadth and scale of the organization under lyricists has allowed us to take advantage of some additional resources within the organization bringing in people from other parts of the organization to help us take a fresh look at some things that has been really positive for us and has also let us take some risks with how we move forward with development with other things that we're trying to do in ways that we couldn't with Dura space because we had to be very conservative there wasn't much as much of a safety net I guess you'd say. And so for instance with D space we have moved to a paid development model for the remainder of D space 7 which adds expense and we're doing fundraising to cover those expenses right now but because we have the larger organization with more resources kind of behind us we can take on that risk and a little bit with a little bit more confidence. Thanks Christy go ahead Robin oh you're muted. I think the largest impact that archive space experienced was having to move within the organization and move under new executive leadership. When Dura space merged with lyricists it became the division of community supported programs and so collection space archive space and other things moved in under but while it's only been a short time and I think a lot of the expectations archive space had has not yet been realized I think that they have actually been able to work more closely with the other programs there's been a lot more sharing of things like lessons learned. I think the overall cost for all the programs for that executive level and has gone down or at least they're getting more for their money if that makes sense because we've got a much fuller administration level and as Christy was saying a much larger budget within lyricists for all these programs but you know the other programs coming in alongside archive space definitely had things that archive space could benefit from. I think it was mentioned before about the assessment being done across and there's discussions across all of the programs and how we can share things hopefully in the future we'll be able to share things like development cycles and other things but it's been largely a positive impact. For Sinvera I would say this is very odd for me because I'm also the chair for Fedora and it's an interesting dichotomy seeing sort of how Fedora has been impacted and how Sinvera has been impacted. On for Sinvera I think actually we've seen some negative impacts particularly around hiring. There are MOU which underneath DuraSpace was easily sort of just renewed for finances we had to go through a whole new set of challenges. One of our partner institutions, Emory University, will be hiring the community manager and unfortunately some of those delays around our MOU caused delays in hiring and now Emory is under a hiring freeze as everybody else's I'm sure and so you know we have I have as the hiring manager concerns about whether or not we'll be able to sort of push this forward. I suspect we will but you know you don't really know as I'm sure you're all aware the COVID situation changes every single day and so I would say immediately it was that not really understanding why the community needed this position sort of caused a lot of delays. I think there was thoughts that oh well lyricists can just sort of cover that work and it's and it was like no we don't really think that they can right we think we really do need somebody and we need somebody dedicated to us because we are a community of communities and we're not just asking this person to manage a single community but to help all of these products move themselves forward and so I would say on the San Bernard side it was negative on the Fedora side it's it's been positive and we did have a lot of integration with Aaron Tripp you sat on in on all the Fedora meetings prior to the merger but afterwards you know having Robert sit in on our meetings I think has driven us in interesting directions like Tim mentioned he's sort of throwing out ideas and I'm asking us to think about why we've been doing what we've been doing and how maybe we can change but I'll let Tim talk a little bit more. Thanks Rosie I'll go quickly but I think one of the things is that Aaron from the Durr space side at least that's who I'm aware of probably some other Durr space staff and folks at lyricist kind of protected us from a lot of the legalese and so we would hear there's a decision point here but all this other stuff is masked as work so in some ways I'm very grateful for that the the main things that I kind of was looking towards after getting through some of the angst about change was the larger infrastructure so when you're in a very very small shop you're building the website you're writing the blog posts you're asking for grants you're doing the finance and moving into lyricist there's more specialization and there's some real lovely things about that like here's a thing we need to do and here's a team that knows how to do it and so I think that's been wholly positive and that's in areas around granting infrastructure communication events and finance and probably HR as well so that's really all I would say right now. Great thanks Tim and I think and we've got one more question after this but here we're just kind of wondering about unrealized opportunities so things that haven't happened yet but maybe things that you hope will happen and I think just for the sake of time if everyone has maybe one thing that they're kind of thinking of that would be probably helpful so we can start with Julia and feel free to pass and come back if you don't have something at top of mind but but go ahead whenever you're ready. Yeah thanks David I think that I would say that you know we're looking for ways to make Vivo more accessible to a wider group of wider community so we're thinking about exploring kind of possibly a more streamlined version of Vivo and a hosted service so I think this being part of lyricists and getting that guidance to find funding and even grants through the catalyst fund is probably our biggest opportunity. Thanks. Yeah and I wrote one one thing down as I was thinking about this although I think there's a lot of potential opportunities but the thing I think about is just I would like to see more and I think we can do more coordination and cooperation across the platforms and across the programs which I think Robin alluded to earlier. Yes I think I'd add to that besides integration with some of the platforms really you know some of the more mature programs the older programs that came into lyricists have worldwide adoption and while archive space was built you know by people from Australia primarily I don't think it's got quite the adoption worldwide that we'd like to see so I think there's some things that could be some opportunities there. So I'm going to actually sort of talk umbrella-y unrealized operations you know Christie sort of touched on better collaboration with all of the communities unfortunately the communities were supposed to come together at the core meeting in Peru and aside from the fact that I just wanted to go to Peru I was also really looking forward to that meeting. I think there are things that at least the repository communities could benefit from around standardization of the tools that they have and that's not just underneath core but from an infrastructure perspective and standardizing around the way that we do certain things that would make it easier for all organizations everywhere to move back and forth between different platforms. It would also make it easier for those non-repository communities to better understand how the repositories work and then integrate with them. So I think that is an unrealized opportunity. I do know that Robert is very keen on making that happen and is really hopeful that we can come together and do that collaboration. He was still trying to I had conversations with him he was still convinced after core was canceled no we could do it we could do it we could do it in Atlanta Rosie maybe you can host and I was like Robert we're not having any meetings we'll have to wait it'll be okay but I know he really really wants to make that happen and bring all of these communities together. I don't I think everybody's covered the the things that I would think about which include globalization a tighter knit community and I think anything that reduces barriers to entry so I think potentially hosting and some of the work that's been done to get us to Fedora 6 and other some of the other products will help reduce barriers to entry so greater greater sense of risk reduction and preservation and access across all of our communities. Great thanks Tim so we have one more question which is probably an obvious one given the times we're living through but after this we are opening it up to audience Q&A so do feel free to put your questions in if you haven't already and so again final question for the panelists here how has the COVID-19 pandemic affected the the programs that you work with Julia go ahead whenever you're ready. Well I think the problem I want to speak to the budgetary challenges I've seen that sort of the focus of our community and our leadership group has really been kind of fracturing people just don't have with the bandwidth right now you know it's really it's such a sad time and you know that takes its toll but I also have been thinking about the challenge that this gives us and that is really making open technologies and open communities a big part of our recovery going forward right how do we present and position our programs as the smartest way to move forward in these times and for so many reasons and and I don't know how to do that yet but that's what I'm thinking about. Yeah I think that you know it's impacted us in a few few ways Rosie already mentioned the cancellation of the core meeting where we were going to have these conversations about greater collaboration and integration. Our leadership our governance groups are international we have members from Italy Germany and elsewhere where they were experiencing impacts much earlier than we were in the US and that disruption so that disruption to our kind of governance dynamic has been going on for a while and that's it's just difficult to see it's emotionally difficult as Julia mentioned and I think that it's had some impact on productivity in terms of the development software development on d-space seven understandably and predictably I think we're seeing that across most of our organizations um but overall I would say the resilience of our communities have been really strong and I think part of that is what Julia was saying about the opportunity we see to really lead in this moment with these platforms and the you know open infrastructure and open content and the impact that we can have on what's happening now and what comes after. The other I'll just mention I don't really want to talk about budget stuff but I guess that is one of the big impacts and we're in the middle of a fairly sizable fundraising effort with our members to fund some additional d-space seven development and we were having great success with it prior to everything changing and I think it remains to be seen what all the impacts are going to be on that but that is you know something we're dealing with and concerned about. I'd have to agree with others that have talked about the interruptions that we have gone through and whether that's at the governance level or at the development level I think in one way you know everybody was working remotely anyway and so sometimes our conference calls and other things felt like business as usual and might be the only normal thing in our life but but I think that our face-to-face meetings that we haven't been able to have that's you know less in the communication I am really grateful that we have the technology we have to be able to work and see each other online but there has been an interruption in the development across all the programs I think but also it's changed up how we have to argue for funding. Some people are saying that more digital resources are being depended upon and so that makes our programs more important but when people are looking at the budget and our hospitals losing 80 million dollars a week so that's a huge amount of money going out that has to be recovered so it impacts everything. Yeah just to echo the budget situation, St. Vera sent out its first round of invoices for the country for its new contribution model and you know we've we've been clear with our community that they don't need to provide the full contribution until the not this fiscal year next fiscal year but we're already hearing back around people saying I don't know if we can do that this year which then brings issues to the next year so one thing is that's good is that we do have money that has been set aside we wanted to make sure we had a two-year cushion before we made a hire of a community manager so that we can guarantee the position at least always one year in advance we didn't want to just spend down all the money and and then be living hand-to-mouth so to speak. I think everybody's hit the the the things that I'm thinking about it used to be like who are you going to buy your socks from and now it's like well maybe we're buying our socks from Walmart but I'm I'm pretty sure we're headed towards adorning our own socks and so the the question then becomes how do you how do you fund this really important work with with really limited resources I will say that the the thing that I think has been the most personally appealing to me is that there's a bigger seawall with lyricists than there was I think with DuraSpace and so some amazing talent that I've worked with for years and come to care deeply about I feel like are in a much better situation to weather this particular storm so it's basically personal feelings I will say that Estee Pope at Amherst has has written a lovely description of how the importance of open open source open access open communities is at this time and I just think it's kind of terrible that as the the clarity around needing this infrastructure shoots up in this crisis the ability to fund it despite willingness may be may be hampered a little bit yeah I need to make one quick correction that's 85 million per month not weak for UVA medical but it's still a huge loss one thing I also wanted to add on to Tim's comment is within Fedora we're even talking about bridging memberships because we don't want to lose our community we have really great individuals who contribute from their institution they give a lot back and to lose them would be huge for us so we don't want to lose those and that's actually an idea that came from Robert he thought he said in our meeting what about bridging memberships for those who may drop because of this crisis can we bridge those memberships just to say yeah you can't pay this year but you're still a member you're not you're not going to get rid of us that quickly because those members those in those institutions are really valuable both from a providing financial resources but also the the human resources that they provide are extremely valuable yeah thanks Rosalind and and to everyone uh for all the uh the answers um I think we're we're ready at this point uh to use the time remaining for questions from the audience and I will maybe just leave this slide up as we as we take those questions just for any of you that want to learn a little bit more about any of these programs or lyricists more generally those are those are the links but yeah with that I think we can open up the floor for for questions thanks David and thanks to all our panelists for really interesting conversation today about these challenges all the issues that you're facing with this merger this consolidation and so many issues that I think apply more broadly at this time which I think a lot of folks will find interesting in this context and in others so I won't delay any more because I see lots of questions coming in so let me just get started right away and the first question comes from Roger Schoenfeld who says I'd love to hear more about institutional adoption of repositories since the merger specifically are the various Duraspace cloud-based repository offerings growing their market share versus v-press digital commons and other competing offerings so that's probably uh yeah the the division of of lyricists that works on sort of the cloud-based offerings is not the one that I work directly with so I really don't have the the numbers for that that question in front of me I think it's a very good one and one that we can probably follow up with but I wouldn't want to venture an answer just because it's it's sort of outside where uh where I work at and I'm not sure if any of you really have any insight into that but I really don't have the numbers in front of me I would say anecdotally san vera has seen uh just a handful of institutions moving from v-press to san vera they're not I mean I would say that d-space is much more analogous to v-press than san vera or fedora are um so I would sort of look to christie to see it seems like you're growing so I yeah and I think that the the it's a tough question to answer we don't track this kind of adoption at the open source level as well as maybe we we could or would be nice to it's very difficult to track who's using an open source product and so we have a sense of that but not really hard data as far as I know the d-space direct service at lyricists would be a good you know kind of test for that I will agree with rosie anecdotally in texas where I am we see some you know a handful of institutions moving from from v-press to d-space or other open source platforms but we've also seen a couple go the other way so I it may be a wash anybody else on that one okay all right thank you thanks very much for that answer thanks for the question roger uh looks like we had a comment come in as well um let's see oh it's also includes a question this is a very this was a very helpful panel is the comment and thanks to all the contributors greater collaboration among the service offerings seems to all panelists to be an opportunity that the merger affords when any of the panelists care to be more specific about examples of collaboration that they see as most desirable so um I will say that um in fedora we've chosen to move to the oxford common file layout as our um way of storing content that we put into fedora um that has an upstream impact on san vera repositories and islandora repositories so um it may make it easier for folks to move back and forth between um san vera and islandora or using fedora to build your own repository on top I would love to see d-space also um think about adopting OCFL um again because it may really help um with folks migrating back and forth um between the different repository platforms um so that is me lobbying christy while simultaneously telling you what my hope is is lobby via presentation I also think that there's a real opportunity to share resources across the different programs and duraspace was doing that some um but we've also I think done more of it since we've come under lyricists and that's in terms of you know if you need someone to do uh some technical oversight work or uh some project management support or bounce ideas maybe you've got a new a new person in a role and they need to have people to bounce ideas off of there's a lot more cross-pollination across the programs that I think we could do um I'll speak up and say I I think anything that reduces barriers towards um any institutional entity trying to get their stuff into a system manage it and preserve it is good um I think some of the larger conversations were beginning to happen around the open communities and what's exciting to me about this is to a certain extent lyricist synthesizes several voices into a bigger voice to help speak to that need to coordinate more effectively nationally and internationally to spend our our collective resources more wisely but I'd love to see a small medium and large or so that anybody can get themselves uh their their their stuff taken care of that's I'm losing words I would also say that the open there's the open platform initiative um one of the many of the things that we talked about in that initiative was around funding many of the communities that are now underneath lyricists um so I do think that the merger between lyricists and duris space makes it easier to see a way of being more sustainable with our open source communities um again you know sharing resources sharing technologies making it easier to move back and forth between products um you know I think I think a lot of the challenges open source communities have been facing or something that lyricists um is well positioned to help us solve I agree and I want to add I think there are some concrete things that we know about where we could collaborate across platforms like Rosie mentioned with OCFL I think there are just some things we don't even know um and we haven't yet figured it out and I think that the the desire and the idea of cross-platform integrations or collaborations has been around for a long time way before the merger uh with lyricists we've been talking about you know fedora and dspace integrations or various things along those lines but I think that each of our well I'll just speak for dspace at least a lot of our programs have been very focused on kind of subsistence living just kind of getting it getting it done getting to the next year doing the fundraising the development and what lyricists offers us with its larger organization and and greater set of resources the ability to think a little bit bigger than that and to think beyond just the subsistence living that some of us have have been doing for a while that's my two cents thank you thanks so much thanks so much everyone and thank you for the wonderful questions I just want to invite you to go ahead and type in your questions we do have a little bit of time to take more questions if you have more for our panel and I also just want to mention that if you would like to um have your microphone turned on and um interact um address the panel directly make a comment ask a question live please feel free to raise your virtual hand and um I can unmute you and we can do that in this environment um I also want to remind everyone that you are here as part of CNI's spring 2020 virtual conference we are so delighted you made time out of your day to join us and hear about this topic I'm sharing with you now um a direct link to the schedule for the rest of the meeting will be going on through the end of May with lots of interesting webinars and presentations yet to come so check out the lineup and register for more offerings now through the end of May so with that I think we have no more questions in the Q&A list and I want to extend a heartfelt thanks to our panelists for coming and talking to us about the merger their experience their reflections and who are audience for coming and asking great questions and being a part of this webinar today