 So yes, this is towards coherence through collective action, laying the foundation for sustainable open infrastructure. And we've got four of us here to talk, and so we'll just go through introductions real quick before we start laying the foundation for the foundation and jumping into it. So Catherine is through unforeseen circumstances as happens, wasn't able to be here in person, but she is joining us remotely wonderfully. And so perhaps Catherine, we could start with you on the introductions and we'll go down the line. Sure, so I'm Captain Skinner. I'm the executive director of the Ejukopia Institute and I am working on one of the projects that we'll be talking about today, several of the projects you would talk about. I'm Morris York. I am the associate university librarian for IT at the University of Michigan Library. After five years, I'll get used to saying that. And I work on a wide variety of the infrastructure and community projects that we're going to be talking about today as well. I'm Aviva Wainraub. I'm the associate university librarian for collections and technologies at Northwestern University, and I too have been working on a number of these projects for quite a long time. Also today is my birthday. Aw, happy birthday. Thanks. We will not sing to Aviva. Are you sure? If someone else can, I will not. I'm Heather Joseph. I'm the executive director of Spark. I have the privilege of working with these folks on the invest-in-open project that we'll be talking about today and also in various aspects of the work that Spark is doing on community controlled infrastructure collaborating with them across the board. Yeah. So to give a, oh, that doesn't want to advance. OK, there we go. Quick overview of what we're going to do today. So we're really talking about three coordinated initiatives. And we're going to set up a general context first and then characterize each one of those three. The three are the invest-in-open infrastructure initiative, also known as ILI, the open platform initiative, and the mapping scholarly infrastructure census. So then we'll do the framing and mission and vision around the entire concept of community infrastructure and collective action, especially this concept of coherence and what that is. Look at the overview of the initiatives and the niche for action, niche for action, whichever you like. And we'll also then go into sort of just open questions. We really would like a dialogue. This is why we've all come is to engage in a dialogue. We were pretty sure that actually there would be probably like five people here because we knew we were up against the UC system in Elsevier. So I will say about our slides. In that context, there are very few pictures and tons of text and very little humor. So there's like the intention behind that is we knew like, OK, maybe people are going to want to read this later and see what the presentation was about. And also we're humorless. And we're humorless. We can't do that. So we're a lot of what we're talking about is on the slides. We're not going to read them to you, but you don't have to read them either because we're going to be talking about them and everything like that. And just a quick context on here. So IOI, invest in open infrastructure is kind of a global view. How do we build global community infrastructure at scale? The open platform initiative is really looking more at the local context. Let's say it's sort of seeded from the US initiatives, looking particularly at North America. What can we do there? When we look at the global scale, and IOI realized very quickly, I think you can't have one thing for the entire globe. South America is not the same as Europe. It's not the same as Southeast Asia or North America and so on and so forth. Open platform really took a look at what is possible when we move into those sort of continental or national perspectives. And Mapele Scali infrastructure really says, well, what have we created so that the other two can start to say, what are we going to do about it? And just a few signs of the times, things that have been happening recently, just in the last few months and last few weeks, in this space adjacent to this space, in the things happening in the commercial sector, and are very important as well. So Lyrisis Endura Space announced their merger and are merging by July 1st of 2019. This is one of the major players in the library market and that many of us are members of, saying looking at one of the umbrellas for the open source projects and saying we're stronger together, we should join together. Also, earlier this year, in the higher ed space, Hampshire College announced that it was potentially insolvent and might not have a fall class and had to contact students and start telling them to prepare for the fact that there might not be a fall class. They announced a desire to merge and turns out that there are long time partners in that, is it four college consortium? Five, it was gonna be four if Hampshire folds. In the five college consortium and the other four looked at them and said, no, I don't think so. So that Hampshire is still looking for a partner to merge with, so that the college doesn't go insolvent. Of course, the UC system breaking their contract with Elsevier, those folks are just upstairs talking about that. Stay here. Yes, you can stay here. And how many people probably didn't notice this in the last few weeks? MySpace made a little announcement. Yes, MySpace is still around. A few weeks ago announced, I think to a lot of people surprised, that they were making any kind of announcement, that they had actually lost all of the user uploaded content from 2003 to 2015. It was gone. So the ironic thing was that about a year ago that all of the content became inaccessible. It was just non-functional. And they said they would fix it. And then they went into a server migration and then they had to make an announcement that it was all actually just gone. It was gone. So it's kind of funny a little bit. I mean MySpace is a little bit of joke of the modern social media world. It's like they're still around. But what if that wasn't MySpace? What if it was like the University of Michigan? Then it might not be so funny anymore, right? So this is just to provide context for the importance of what we're diving into and particularly collective community action. So Heather, if you'd be. My job is to give you a little bit of the overview of the context for again what we're talking about here. And what I really want to say is see last talk and Kathleen Fitzpatrick's keynote for a full context. So just keep it really brief. I mean we all know we've had a steady stream of recent developments ranging from commercial acquisitions of key infrastructure to new policy mandates that have really put the issue of who owns, who controls scholarly communications infrastructure right smack into the spotlight. And it's no secret to anybody in this room that key platforms, tools, systems, ranging from publishing platforms to discovery tools, research assessment systems, productivity tools, you name it, things that are critical to the full research life cycle are increasingly vulnerable to not just commercial provision but exclusive commercial provision. And part of the crux of the matter for us is really that the companies that we're dealing with may or may not share the values of our academic institutions. And our history with many of these commercial vendors has shown that they tend to consistently move more in the direction of locking things up and minimizing competition than moving towards open sharing, which is really the direction that the academic and higher ed community is going in. And additionally, even when projects are open, tending towards open, we're seeing a tendency for those projects to operate in a little bit of a siloed environment, maybe not working together as smoothly or as interoperably as we would like in terms of inconsistent funding, functionality, and goals. So really leading to a need for movement in this space. And... Yeah, Catherine, go for it. That leads me. So yeah, there are a lot of things we don't know. So one of the things that's really challenging right now in the scholarly communications space is just getting our heads around who are the players? What are they doing? What is it that we've created? What are the different motivations for all of these different players and stakeholders that are invested in some way, whether for a profit motive or for other motives, whether you're talking about the scholars and what they're creating or whether you're talking about the libraries and what they're trying to provide access to. Who are all of these players? And how do they interlock or not? Whose interests are being served by the current system and what's left out of that picture? And so particularly looking at the system level of use and not just looking at an individual institution and what that institution is able to provide access to or gain access to, but instead looking across the system, we see that a lot is being left out and that there are some interests being served in ways that actually keep others from being served as well. And then finally, you know, overall, what does landscape look like now and what is it that we've actually created? So these are some of the questions that all of us are grappling with right now and that we can't really move forward until we know. So really these become sort of the key questions. So we say, what's at stake here and what could happen if we don't act? It really becomes the driving question. And there's so many people, so many good organizations participating in this space. And in a certain way, this is like a great gathering point. This is the moment that is calling us together and we have to ask this question of what happens if we don't act. So these questions of who controls the knowledge, what's saved, who gets to say who gets saved, who gets to see what, if it does get saved and on what terms and particularly who decides. And there's an enormous risk particularly, you know, so if we enter into these questions of who gets to see what and it may be the first question becomes those with power and wealth. But what happens to all of the communities and people that are depending on this knowledge going forward and we're talking about a long range of human knowledge moving into the future. Looking at this imbalance that could be created between academy owned and commercial infrastructure. So this privatization of public knowledge. The silent behaviors that we can get into in a global network world. I mean, this is the trend, this is a global trend actually for the last 150 years is towards networks. And it's a severe loss of national and international competitiveness if we fall into the silent behavior that we could be sliding into right now. Increasing waste and redundancy. So we're all highly concerned about our resources, particularly when those aren't used well. But if we look in the commercial sector at very large technological infrastructure projects like say the Obamacare website and national health infrastructure cost millions and millions of dollars before it ever rolled out the door. That rolled forward and is in place today. So waste is not particular to our segment. It's not particularly to what we do. But we have to pay intense attention when we have limited resources and limited capabilities to direct those. And particularly what's at risk here is that we become unable to serve as effective stewards of the scholarly and cultural record. This is what we depend on. It's what our institutions depend on us for. It's what actually the public depends on us for. So the loss of relevance, integrity, trust that can come with that deeply damaging for us. But actually for the public and for the durable progress of humanity. So in a lot of our discussions, many of us have agreed over time that we really need a new way of framing how we might work through this problem. So we've got examples of efforts to point to and work from that have highlighted the gaps and the challenges to creating collective community spaces. Many of us in this room, maybe all of us in this room, have invested in some way in projects like Vivo, Duraspace, Fedora, Deepin, AP Trust, the Software Preservation Network, Sanvera, Fedora, Islandora, TripleIF, I think I said Fedora twice, DeSpace, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, right? So we know that many of our community investors are frankly sick and tired of spending $10,000 here and $5,000 there and what is my money going for and is it paying for this person and why doesn't this community have somebody and I don't understand what's going on and why can't you all just work together? Maybe you've heard that before. So we know that the agencies that have funded our projects are also telling us to look beyond assuming that they will always be there to fund our projects. So as we're moving away from innovation and we're moving toward maintenance, we really need to take this as an opportunity to rethink how we as community investors spend our money as we try to create something that is around supporting sustainability and interoperability. So if you've heard Heather talk about the multi-trillion dollar industry in this room just moments ago, that the content providers are hoping to bank on as they move into the data analytics business, we really do recognize that there is a narrow window for us to construct and support a comprehensive framework for collective action to impact the broader ecosystem at a global scale. So we are trying to approach this from a different angle than we have in the past, right? So we're attempting to embrace this from a truly sort of global perspective. We recognize that we are a series of communities and alliances, some of which are interoperable and interdependent and that we are not going to come up with a sort of collective blanket solution for everything for everyone, right? That I am, nobody is sitting here saying that what works for one community is necessarily going to work for another. That's not what we're talking about here. But we're looking to build a coherence approach where we use the structural elements of our various projects to ensure interoperability and interoperation. And finally, what we're really hoping to do is create a sustainable financial stewardship model to really allow us to reinvest in what we're building and be responsible with the limited resources that we have available. So we're really trying to sort of pull the risk that we have for failure and to manage that investment really thoughtfully. So with that, we'll go through and start looking at these projects in specific, both what's going on with them and how they interoperate. So, Catherine, if you start with the scholarly, mapping scholarly infrastructure. Absolutely. So the context for the mapping scholarly communication infrastructure project really starts off with all of the things that we've just been talking about. It's a slightly audacious project. So I will own that up front. And as a consultant on this project, I definitely warned the PIs that we were biting off a lot in what we were trying to do here. The PIs on this project are Mike Roy and David Lewis. And Mike from Middlebury College, I'm sure many of you in the room know him. And today for David Lewis, who is at IUPUI recently. And what we're trying to explore in this project is really what is the state of higher education and scholarly communication as a system? So really taking that system level view rather than the institution level view and trying to understand how can we move, if not to a completely open system, to at least a system that is significantly more open than what it is right now? How do we move to something that is more affordable, particularly over time? So that instead of the escalating cost that we've gotten so used to, we actually start to see a plateau at least and maybe even see a decrease in cost of scholarship. We recognize that scholarship's never gonna be free, but there does not have to be an exorbitant price tag attached to every piece of scholarly communication. And then we're also trying to think about how to take advantage of the affordances of the digital to really rethink what counts as scholarship and what counts as the scholarly record. So in order to accomplish that, we've got two big project goals, one of which is to map the range of infrastructure that, whoops, go back. Sorry. I'll tell you. There you go, yep. One of those is to map the range of infrastructure that comprises the system of scholarly communication. So as I said, audacious. We're looking globally. We're looking across with open and non-open spaces and we're really looking at all different types of scholarly communication infrastructure, tools, services, et cetera. We're trying to take as broad of you as possible. We've had a census underway over the course of the last couple of months, which I'll tell you about in just a moment. And then we've got a number of other project activities. This is a relatively small project. It's one and a half year of Mellon-funded project. Andrew W. Mellon Foundation generously funded this. And the second big piece of the project will be surveying colleges and universities in order to understand what the current investment practices are for those colleges and universities. And that gives us some of the grounding we hope to understand and interpret both the cost of the system, which the census is helping to identify, and then also what are the investment possibilities that we bring as a community. Before we do the next slide. So the census, our goal with the census is to really try to assess what the strengths and birth opportunities are for different communities and infrastructures and providers across the scholarly communication space. And so we needed a good backbone, a strong backbone to really begin gathering the critical organizational and financial and other types of data that undergird that strength of a community or an organization. And so we built on the Community Cultivation Field Guide, which for those of you who haven't come into contact with it yet, this is an Ejukopia publication from last year that summarizes the last 12 years of our work and really takes the model that we've been using with lots of different communities, not just those that are housed within Ejukopia, but also a broad range that we've consulted with and really distills down the principles and what it is that we're trying to do to help communities mature up over different time frames in different skill sets. And so what we're looking at in the census is really the organizational side of the context in which these scholarly communications, tools, services, et cetera, are being built. Also the technical, the fiscal, the administrative, the governance structures, how community engagement is handled, and then also HR and staffing activities. And what we wanted to be able to do with this census is lay a baseline so that we can start to establish a health index for what we're calling scholarly communication resources, that's SCR that you see on the slide, mainly through the aggregated data. So this is not an attempt to judge individual organizations or individual communities. It's really trying to understand again at the system level like what are some of the things that are predictive and that we can start to encourage groups to do that they may not be doing already. Next slide. So at this point we have run the first iteration of the census. The census was opened from February 18th to March 22nd. We sent it out to invitation only. So we identified about 125, 150, I think, different scholarly communication resources globally that our project team, our advisors, the IOI group, which you'll hear about in just a few minutes, and then JRost, all of us worked together to identify who are some of the crux points within the scholarly communication infrastructure right now. And we invited them one by one to take this survey. So far 45 have responded. That is huge because this is a big undertaking. As anybody in the room who has taken it knows, it can take up to three hours to fill out the depth of information that we're asking for. We've also had indications of interest from 25 others who are 27 others who did not have time to do it within our tight one month time frame, but who do want to be included. And so we're continuing to gather data at this point. These visualizations that you're seeing today are not hot off the press. There's no press yet. This is literally off of the drafting table. So we just normalize the data over the course of the last two weeks, and we're in the process right now of starting to see what the data tell us. So on this slide, what you're seeing is a couple of map views that include some of the content. And there are lots of things that need to be fixed about this, but you can kind of see the positioning of 25 that we've so far worked with. And you can also see in the blue dots on the bottom or the blue colored in the squares, which of the different types of activities, these different scholarly communication resources are engaging in. We've anonymized all the data. Mostly we're gonna be looking at this in aggregate when we do full report outs. So that's why it's anonymized at this point. Go ahead and move forward. So some of the types of things that we don't know right now about the system. One of those things is how fiscally strong and how strong in terms of the VISTA systems that our infrastructure elements are running with, how stable are those? And so this particular graph stood out to me as I was walking through the data over the last couple of days. And this is just six of our respondents and it was chosen randomly and anonymized, but this is pretty similar to what the whole pile of data looks like. What you're seeing here is in each one of these columns, you're seeing one of the scholarly communication resources. So SCR one, SCR two, et cetera. For each of those columns, you're seeing three bar graphs. The first is for 2016, second is 2017, third is 2018. And what it's showing you is the fiscal variance. So how big of a difference was there between what the scholarly communication resource expected to both bring in in terms of income and expend in terms of its expenditures? How big was the difference between what they budgeted at the beginning of the year and what they actually did at the end of the year? And in mature businesses, what we would expect to see is fairly stable near zero amounts, at least most of the time here every year. That's not the trend we're seeing here. We're seeing highly, highly variable infrastructures, which when we correlate that with some of the other information that we're gathering about the different fiscal models, we're gonna be able to shed light on some of the things that make this such a fragile moment for the infrastructure. Next slide. This gives another quick view. And I mean, again, there's three hours worth of data from each one of these scholarly communication resources that we're working through. And so these are just very small glimpses of the types of things that we can show. Again, anonymized. And what you're seeing on the left-hand side is two different organizational pieces. So a succession plan. You wanna know in a scholarly communication tool service, et cetera, what do you do when crisis is? What do you do if leadership needs to change, et cetera? So how many of them had a succession plan versus not? Again, random choice on these 15, but it's pretty indicative of the overall set. And then annual reports. It's another marker of kind of maturity or how much are you sharing and how far are you able to share it? And then we also ask questions about things like the organizational structure and the legal structure. So you can see on the right-hand side, the organizational structure. The first column is standalone. The second is hosted. So you can see that difference between who has broken off and become an organization in its own right versus who is hosted either under someone like at Jocopia or Duraspace or Lyrisis or Clear or who is hosted by an academic institution, et cetera. And then the legal structure delves a little deeper into that. How many are for-profits versus not-for-profits? Are there B-core? What types of forms are we seeing? And next data. Our next slide. So overall, and again, quick snapshots, all of this very rough, but what the census is going to be able to tell us, we think, is a good bit about what we've created and what the landscape looks like today. How initiatives are supported and how stable that support is. And that's both revenue, but also community engagement. We have a ton of questions that related to the types of structures that are in place to support community communications and how often those are being used and in what way. We're also hoping to be able to identify what some of the greatest risks are to the infrastructures that we're supporting today. And we want to identify how we can improve the ways we build and fund tools and services. That's crucial to everything else you're gonna hear about in this presentation. It's one of the really important things that hopefully we're gonna be able to shed some light on. And then finally, can we responsibly use this type of information, particularly when it moves from pilot, which is where this small project is, to something that is more rigorous, more robust and run year-over-year? Can we responsibly use this type of information to actually guide the investments that we make? So I'll hand it back to you. And the kind of work that the census, the kind of information that the census is providing us is definitely helping to inform this second project that we wanted to talk a little bit about today, which is this IOI Invest in Open Infrastructure effort. And against the backdrop that we just talked about, a whole host of international organizations interested in or involved in providing open source infrastructure tool services have kind of got together to develop what's titled a joint roadmap for open science tools when you have heard us reference J-ROS just about a year ago this month. And just to give you an idea of who's involved in J-ROS, like just a small snapshot of the roster, everyone from California Digital Library to ASAP Bio to Crossref to Datasite to Dryad, E-Life, Jupiter, Metta, Mozilla, Orchid, Public Library of Science, just a wide range of international groups who were interested and involved in contributing to this space got together to really try to figure out how to do things in an overtly collective manner. And while the initial effort focused on facilitating technical collaboration and that effort continues, a small subset of the group sort of started to meet regularly to really hone in on and focus in on how we could construct a solution for collective funding of these projects to sustain the infrastructure. And the result of that small group collaboration, that small but growing group collaboration is invest and open. And invest and open is essentially an attempt to create a community led global strategic framework for open infrastructure that will be able to support a viable, diverse, efficient, thriving ecosystem to serve as the stable foundation for SCALCOM in the 21st century. It is, again, when we're talking about these projects, we do have, I think, an audacious vision for the context of the projects. And the mission is really to enable not just for today, but for the future, durable, scalable, and long lasting infrastructure to emerge, thrive, and deliver benefits on a global scale. And the direction that we've kind of taken to do this was to try to create a strategic global sort of framework, which is an interesting kind of label for the collective body that's gotten together with a mandate to facilitate and create a shared strategy and agenda for this collective funding across international stakeholders. And the way that this group is working, I should say, we'll talk in a second about the folks who are involved in this project. It's been a group that's sort of accreted members as we've gone along. And I do wanna point out that so many of the projects that are involved in JROS are able to articulate sort of the desired, the same desired end state for their projects. I think the real power and the potential of IOI is to be able to do this on a collectively across that broad range and that diversity of different kinds of projects. The sort of shared vision is to have that fully formed end to end community owned slash community controlled infrastructure that will support all aspects of science and scholarship in the fullness of the research and scholarly life cycle to provide sufficient funding to not only support the startup, right, the innovation and evolution of these kinds of pieces of infrastructure, but also where the things tend to fall off in the funding cycles is in that sort of mundane day to day maintenance and operation where there's an enthusiasm for providing funding in the beginning and it's really difficult to build the right structures for ensuring the long-term stability of infrastructure. And also really making sure that we have a funding from a mix of sources. There's a tendency in the community and we're all aware of it, that we do these sort of pass the hats to libraries to contribute certain amounts of money and think that going back to that single well for funding or just going to research funders to provide funding for the entire life cycle of an infrastructure initiative, we've seen from our experience it simply doesn't work. So really looking to provide a mechanism for ensuring a diversity of revenue streams and sources of funding is a key element of this endeavor. As I mentioned, I gave you sort of some of the names that are involved in the J-ROS group, the Joint Roadmap for Open Science Tools and many of those folks that J-ROS group is represented on IOI in terms of the group of organizations, coalitions and sort of like-minded efforts who have come together under the IOI umbrella to do this. There's been a lot of conversation in the last year about efforts like the 2.5% proposal. You've heard of, I'm sure, of SCOS, right? The effort to do a large-scale community sustainability structure. All of those efforts are involved in IOI. So this has been an effort to kind of really look and say we've heard the rap time and time again that all these individual efforts kind of spring up, they have different ideas about how to proceed and then we kind of all go off into our different corners and try to come up with funding structures. IOI is actually an effort to kind of put our arms around all of those things and work together from the inception of these ideas to create a structure that might have components of those different projects, but that ultimately creates that kind of robust framework with all of those characteristics and that ideal end-to-end steady state that we're trying to achieve. And it's open, I should say. So it's invest in open and the membership in this particular group is open. So if you know of initiatives or if you're involved in an initiative that would like to be part of the planning process for IOI, it is a wide open group at this point and we would welcome additional participants. Fantastic. Great. So, and to that point, all three of these initiatives in some sense were emerging alongside each other at exactly the same time. We all kind of found each other and was like, you're working on that? You're working on that? Oh, we should work together somehow. Right? These got to connect. Actually, it was at CNI in December and I was walking into breakfast and John Dunn grabbed me and he was talking to David Lewis and he said, wait, IOI is about to have a meeting in New York coming up in January. It was on my birthday. And I was like, yeah, I'm going to come. So all of this stuff is like immensely emergent and happening alongside each other. And so the open platform initiative will talk a little bit about what that is. Many of the folks that have been involved in the conversations about what the potential is here and what it could look like are in the room. So community is showing up already. And we have at this meeting sort of our first drafts of documents that we can now make public to describe some of what this is and some of the ideas that have been incubating. So if you'd like to see and read those, just get in touch with them. They're not out in the wild yet, but they're totally shareable and we can talk about what's in there and look at them and stuff like that. So what is open platform? So here we're moving into the institutional context, right? The academic institutions, the stewards of content. What's that perspective and how do we join that to the picture? So in the fall of 2018, and this was leadership from 16 research libraries, and a lot of this was hallway conversations and connections and we all agree we've got to do something, right? Something is wrong. And we know we've been involved in this for 25 years. We've been building these platforms and things are not turning out the way that we want them to, particularly with the funding, with the coordination. There's different kinds of problems with the community infrastructure projects. And we all rely on them heavily, these 16 institutions to get our work done and to act as good stewards. So this shared sense of an imminent threat, right? That actually this is right now. I mean, if we wait till next year, it's too late. Something has to be done now because everything in this ecosystem, and I'll show a little bit of picture of, like, what the context of the ecosystem we were looking at, that it's reached a level of complexity and scale that it's just simply overwhelmed the capability of the funding and governance structures that we created to handle it. That doesn't mean we created the wrong things. They were fine for when they were created, but the scale has just gotten so big that they're overwhelmed. And if we keep doing the same things, the results are not going to be good, right? So, as James Hilton, my dean says, let's make different mistakes. We'll not keep making the same ones. So really it's this shared imperative that got us together to look at what can we do to take immediate collective action and really stand behind the commitment that we have to promoting sustainable interoperable infrastructure. And the first meeting of this was in December. It was actually the week before Christmas. And as I was trying to... We were recruiting a number of people and I was talking to Tom Kramer from Stanford. It's like, Tom, Tom, can you come, right? He's like, yeah, yeah, yeah, I think I'm free. I was crazy enough to schedule meetings that week. So that one was in Ann Arbor. We met in Evanston in February. I think it was the exotic locales that had everybody showing up, really. It's the cold. Yeah, it's the cold. So fortunately, there was no... Come for the cold, stay for the infrastructure. Yeah. Oh, I like that. That's going on a t-shirt. You trained me at Spark to come up with these things. So this is a quick... This is part of what we did in gathering that conversation. Is this to say what is going on in these communities? And this data was incredibly hard to collect. It's all on just on various public websites in different formats and you really have to scrape the data. And then it took like 10, 20 of us to come together and create profiles of these communities and how does the governance work and what's in here. And this, to my knowledge, is sort of the first map of really of what's the different funding going in. Who's in there? What kind of governance structure does it have? And we're looking at what stage, right? Early stage, mid stage, late stage, what's the life cycle? How much money total is going into this ecosystem? And one of the compelling drivers behind this conversation, frankly, was the collapse of deep end in the fall. And that shows up as an immediate, wait a second, things are falling apart. Did we do the wrong things? And it's like, no, we didn't do the wrong things. We have to innovate, we have to fail, we have to learn from those, but we have to learn and how do we do that? So just a quick snapshot off of this, which is a fascinating graphic, and if you want to dive into it, we can totally do that later. But one of the things about this was that before deep end collapse, there was about 3.1 million dollars going into this open infrastructure ecosystem. 3.1 million dollars collectively. We're talking from hundreds of institutions. After deep end collapse, probably about 1.9 million dollars. Deep end actually soaked up a lot of investment as a startup. And actually, it would be a shame if we lost what we created with that. We can't do that. It was a big investment over many years. Collectively, just as a point of comparison, HathiTrust, which has also supported 120 plus institutions, has 3.4 million. So before deep end collapse, 3.1 million, HathiTrust, 3.4 million. The problem isn't necessarily that there's not enough money. It's just that it's split up and not very well managed across a lot of projects. Just by way of comparison, ARL institutions, which are a subset of the institutions that use this infrastructure, spend 1.6 billion dollars on collections every year. It's just a point of comparison, you know. But I don't even know what is .00 something percent of that is going to open community infrastructure from hundreds of institutions. So the Open Platform Initiative and this slide I am going to read, because if you've been in some of the leadership workshops, we'll say, right, if you believe something, read it out loud and read it in public and see if you can get through it. So I'm going to do that. And this is coming out of a lot of work of many different people coming together and trying to craft statements to say, what do we believe? What do we know about this space and what can we do about it? So the objective of the Open Platform to create a coherent, interoperable and adaptive ecosystem of systems and services under joint stewardship, resting on a foundation of shared understanding, common purpose and interdependence. It's trying to support usable and dependable technologies, also strengthen the health of the communities that create them and fortify the collaboration of the institutions that use them. Can we show up for each other and can we work together and depend on each other? The purpose to provide value to a diverse community of higher educational and cultural institutions to safely and continuously steward the digital content, integral to academic inquiry, scientific knowledge, and cultural heritage. Doing that by promoting shared capacities and services that enable durability and persistence for content and data, providing usable discovery and access for our users and building and enabling capacities for staff to effectively manage and curate the knowledge stewarded by participating institutions. So the desired future condition from all of that activity through collective action to create an open platform that brings financial, strategic, and institutional coherence to community-built, interoperable, service-driven infrastructure and software projects that support the preservation and access of scholarship and knowledge. And of course, because of what we see and what we have been involved in and what we know is happening, that platform must have an intrinsic, robust capacity to execute, sustain, and scale. Okay, so the open platform is not simply a collection of software and tools. It's a fluid ecosystem, a set of technologies, shared principles and standards that include both open and commercial solutions. So what we are talking about trying to create here is a standard... something that's standards, interoperability, and there's some sort of a certification that goes along with that, that would help to develop and promote interoperability, that documents the various components of the various platforms, and then maintains the alignment with some sort of international standards. We are looking for fiscal stewardship and sustainability, so we are talking about gathering and distributing funding and resources centrally, and then reviewing and evaluating the necessary resources for the various projects that we're talking about funding. And that there will be some sort of structured services, partnership and alliances, which cultivates relationships that works for the whole. To some extent what we're saying is the various projects would still govern themselves, so nobody is coming in and telling them how to behave. And that's really sort of what we're trying to structure, the kind of basic premise of it. So just to give you some idea of who we are, as Morris sort of indicated, we are primarily a group of research libraries that have come together, who have been major supporters and investors of this ecosystem. We are not the only players in this space. We are the ones that were identified as being the heaviest financial investors. That does not mean that as sort of Heather indicated with the IOI conversation, that is not where this conversation ends. We've reached the point where we're opening things up for further conversation and discourse. We're looking for a broad and inclusive initiative, and we're looking for input, and we're looking for other people to be engaged with us in this space. And with that, I just want to say we are open to... Oh, sorry, I missed a slide. Never mind. So within the context of both IOI and Open Platform, we've done a lot of work thinking about sustainability and inclusivity and diversity of thought. But we recognize, as I said, that there is still tremendous room for other voices to be included, a place for further conversation and input, and there is a lot of room to grow here. So we look forward to that as part of our conversation. And with that, we have a whole 15 minutes for questions. And we'll... And to enter into the questions, and this is really part of... This is where community starts showing up. And it's in gathering input and having voices added to the conversation, and adapting and changing, and it starts to become a fluid and malleable thing that we're creating that responds to the needs of the communities. I think a central premise behind all three of the projects that we've been talking here is we can't afford to duplicate efforts anymore. We can't indulge in that. We can't permit it. We can't allow it, or this will collapse. And we have to act together. We have to act in concert. And this is just sort of the fundamental foundation of what we're thinking. Things change, things modify, things always get better. But as long as we can act together, then we'll be moving in the right direction. So with that, and we threw up just a few questions, maybe hopefully people have questions of their own. But this kind of thing, right, these are the kind of questions that are fundamental to these type of community projects. And to start in this day, what do we not know? What do we want to see? We know there are huge gaps. We know there are tons of things that we don't know and lots of blind spots. And calling those into the light and understanding them is actually the only way that we get better. So a few of these questions, other questions that folks might be holding as we're sitting in the room and things that we might want to talk about.