Lyrasis is Strengthening the Foundations of the Organizational Home

Lyrasis has been proud to serve as an Organizational Home for community supported, open-source technologies for more than 10 years. With this rich and extensive experience comes the opportunity for reflection and improvement.  

In 2024, we developed a coordinated and deliberate approach to strengthen and grow the Organizational Home service, enhance its impact and foster the growth and sustainability of Community Supported Technologies (CST) at Lyrasis. 

Since 2024, we have increased our Board representation, developed a strategic funding mechanism and conducted an in-depth analysis of the Organizational Home service. While many activities are still underway, we are pleased to share our progress so far.  

Board Representation 

A key element of the Lyrasis strategy was to enlarge the Lyrasis Board of Directors to include formal representation of the larger CST ecosystem. We are delighted that there are now two seats on the Lyrasis board representing the CST ecosystem. Bianca Amaro, Coordinator of the Brazilian Open Science Program at the Brazilian Institute of Information in Science and Technology (IBICT), serves in one of these roles. Cynthia Hudson-Vitale, Associate Dean of Technology Strategy and Digital Services at Johns Hopkins Sheridan Libraries and University Museums, has been newly appointed and started her term July 1. Their role will be to advocate for organizational structures that ensure these important efforts receive support that complements community-based governance and sustainability mechanisms. 

Growth Fund 

The CST Growth Fund is another significant development designed to help support the CSTs at Lyrasis in their growth. Each CST is supported by a unique community. It is a challenge to continue to meet the needs of the existing community while being strategic in developing resources, features and activities that will continue to grow the community. The Lyrasis Board of Directors unanimously approved the creation of a CST Growth Fund. In this first three-year investment cycle, Lyrasis has provided funding to the CSTs to seed growth specific to their community’s needs. 

• ArchivesSpace: funding a Standards and Testing Archivist position for three years 
• DSpace: funding a junior technical role for three years 
• Fedora: contributing to their Development Fund to help move dependency work forward and subsidizing staffing needs 
• VIVO: contributing towards an easily hostable version and dependent on that work, a technical coordinator for a hosting pilot 
• Interoperability: funding to support developing specifications and prototyping work to enhance interoperability across and beyond the CST family    

This initial one-million-dollar investment from Lyrasis’ reserves is designed to help these programs grow for the future. At the end of three years, these programs will either have additional community support for continuing the roles that have been supported by the fund or have completed specific work that positions them for the future. The goal of the interoperability work is to enable increased adoption and support for these programs and thereby contribute to their ability to sustain it. We hope it may also serve as a model for other participants in an open ecosystem. We envision the CST Growth Fund as a long-term initiative with three-year funding cycles. We will work with the community governance groups to create a more systematic process for future cycles. As a program in the Organizational Home supported directly by Lyrasis, CollectionSpace was not part of the CST Growth Fund.  

Organizational Home Service: Analysis  

Last year Lyrasis invested in a position to review and improve our Organizational Home service. We are pleased to have made substantial progress with much more work still underway. 

Bridget Almas joined us in 2024 as the Director of Operations for CST at Lyrasis to lead these efforts. Bridget has done systematic and thoughtful work to articulate the service’s core principles, value proposition and assessment considerations. We created a diagram to articulate how the service operates with the different programs and communicate the different roles and synergies, while respecting boundaries. These were made available on the website to foster transparency and clarity.  

A foundational element of this effort has been an Organizational Home analysis. An assessment was conducted over six months via a series of interviews with 34 participants in the model including Lyrasis leadership, all staff of CST programs, key Lyrasis staff responsible for providing services to the CST programs and representative members of CST program governance. The analysis assessed the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats for the Organizational Home and identified corresponding prioritized actions to be taken, with the highest priority assigned to actions that address threats and weaknesses. These actions include taking a close look at the costs for and scope of the services that are provided as part of the Organizational Home, and the mechanisms for transparency and accountability.

This first phase of work is expected to wrap up by the end of the 2025 calendar year. Important outcomes of this phase are to enable us to ensure we are living up to the promises of our core principles, especially in the areas of transparent stewardship of program resources and a cost structure that is well understood and sustainable. This will position us to begin to act on our strengths and opportunities, including developing an incubation model that will allow newer community supported programs to have additional support in becoming a member of the Lyrasis CST family. We will continue to use our It Takes a Village (ITAV) framework and toolkit to foster sustainability for these programs.

In alignment with the Lyrasis mission, which reflects a commitment to advancing the shared goals of members and communities we serve, we will have more to announce in the future as we continue to refine, grow and support the communities and the Organizational Home service.

Leadership of Fedora, one of the Community Supported Programs, shared:

The Fedora program is proud to be part of Lyrasis’ renewed commitment to strengthening the Organizational Home, and we are grateful for Lyrasis' ongoing efforts to support community-driven sustainability. Both the work underway to increase transparency, accountability, and flexibility in the Organizational Home service, and the new CST Growth Fund, are welcome initiatives that will go a long way towards making the Fedora program stronger and will help ensure the program's resilience in the years ahead.