Investment and Collaboration for Vireo OSS Sustainability
Funding Area: Capacity building / Construcción de capacidad
Problem Statement: Vireo is an OSS application for thesis and dissertation management and a key component of the open research infrastructure for facilitating publication of scholars’ work in Open Access Repositories. Texas Digital Library (TDL) acts as both a Vireo hosting provider and the OSS community home for Vireo. In this latter role, it serves as lead developer and coordinator for a community of university users across North America and in the Netherlands. While this community attests to the important role of Vireo in the OA ecosystem, TDL has managed it and the ongoing development of Vireo with limited contributions from those users outside of the TDL member base. The existential challenges facing Vireo OSS include (1) lack of adequate resources to engage and coordinate the broader community of users outside of TDL, (2) barriers to developer participation such as inadequate technical documentation and established procedures for code contributions, and (3) lack of mechanisms for financial investment aside from using TDL’s hosting service. A consulting report by Open Tech Strategies confirmed needs in these areas. Acting on recommendations from the OTS report, TDL has funded a part-time 2-year Product Manager position to conduct outreach to open-source users, establish diverse mechanisms for sustainable funding, and remove barriers to software development contributions. Funding here will enable the PM to make major strides towards these objectives and enhance the sustainability of Vireo.
Proposed Activities: Funds from this award will be used to produce training videos for implementers and users of Vireo; create and update documentation to facilitate onboarding of new contributors, maintainers, and users; conduct travel by the Vireo Product Manager (PM) to user institutions in the US to strengthen relationships and establish an improved sustainability model that fosters developer and financial contributions. Prior to the start of the award period, the PM, in consultation with TDL staff and Vireo Users Group Steering Committee (VUGSC), will outline the scope of documentation and video production work and gather existing material necessary. Beginning November 2023: Project partners will enlist contract technical writers to create and improve technical and user documentation in GitHub and the Vireo wiki. Concurrently, we will hire contractors to create training videos for users. We expect production of these deliverables to take the bulk of the award period. The PM will be responsible for liaising with contractors, reporting progress to TDL executive staff and the VUGSC, providing feedback on early iterations, and ensuring on-time completion of the deliverables. January-April 2024: In consultation with TDL staff and VUGSC, PM will refine objectives and agendas for site visits with selected users; determine priority institutions for these visits; and draft a set of tentative proposals for engaging these users more fully in supporting Vireo. March-April 2024: PM will conduct outreach to users to schedule site visits. We anticipate a total of five visits that may include Harvard/MIT, Johns Hopkins, Georgia Tech, Princeton, and Rice. June 2024-March 2025: The PM will conduct site visits with selected users, some of whom engaged with the Open Tech Strategies sustainability investigation. These visits will be used to strengthen relations with these institutions and evolve the relationships from “users” to “partners” in the ongoing development of Vireo. Though we will refine agendas for the visits over time, overall objectives will be to (1) listen to user needs; (2) communicate plans for better support of the Vireo OS community, including ongoing work to produce better documentation and processes; and (3) solicit partnership through discussion of a draft set of proposals for financial and technical contributions that will better sustain the Vireo OSS platform and community. Ideally, these site visits will result in commitments from these institutions to invest in the Vireo community. During this period of listening and discussion with users, the PM and VUGSC will iterate on its initial set of proposals to develop a sustainability model for the platform, allowing for greater financial and in-kind contributions to support Vireo development and deployment. January-December 2025: To align with the updated business model, TDL in consultation with the VUGSC, will engage a contractor to create a branding package and marketing materials to communicate the new model.
Openness: Vireo is a fully open source, community-supported project. All documentation is open and freely available, the annual meeting is virtual and free for anyone to attend, and the source code is maintained on GitHub where users and developers can add and resolve issues and bugs. TDL supports an open Vireo forum via its Vireo User Group (VUG) listserv and active Slack channels for developers and users. Vireo is governed by a VUG Steering Committee composed of Vireo users within the TDL community and outside of it. The VUGSC believes that well-produced training videos for users and administrators will help to expand adoption of the new and improved Vireo 4, which represents a departure and major feature expansion from earlier versions of Vireo. TDL is actively upgrading its Vireo ETD Service members to Vireo 4, but it’s unclear whether others in the OSS community have been moved to do so. Vireo OSS will attract more developer and financial contributions towards its sustainability the more institutions are upgraded to the current software release. While TDL interacts directly with our Vireo ETD Service members, we have very little interaction beyond the Vireo User Group listserv and annual meeting with users outside of the TDL membership. The new product manager visits to the non-TDL-hosted users will help to strengthen those relationships within the Vireo OSS community. Further, in-person negotiations for financial sustainment will be more fruitful than discussions at a distance.
Challenges: The main challenge to Vireo OSS writ large is an existential one, which is that the small pool of developers with limited time have yet to deploy a fully functional production system without major bugs. Functionality has improved significantly over 7 rapid sprints since March of 2023, but TDL’s lead Vireo developer has halved his time commitment, significantly slowing the process of getting TDL members onto production Vireo 4. As for the proposed work, specifically, challenges include our Product Manager’s limited time available for traveling to Vireo partner locations, finding and hiring appropriate contractors to undertake the production of documentation and videos, scoping the video production and technical documentation work appropriately, and membership/sponsorship fatigue and budget strain among higher education institutions who may be resistant to the idea of financial investment in yet another OSS program.
Neglectedness: The Vireo software was originally developed and released under an open source license in 2010 with funds from an IMLS grant (IMLS Grant Number: LG-05-07-0095-07). Since that time, on-going development has been supported largely through volunteer in-kind contributions (i.e. code or committee service) from community members, and to a lesser extent, through hosting fees that TDL receives from its members using its Vireo hosting service. However, hosting fees primarily go toward on-going support for the hosting service and are not sufficient to fully sustain and grow the Vireo OSS community. Since the conclusion of the IMLS grant more than a decade ago, neither TDL nor the Vireo project has received external funding to sustain or grow its open source community.
Success: An increase in developer contributions and financial commitments from outside TDL would indicate success. Currently, the developer pool is so small that even 2 more contributors would be significant. And, since all funding for Vireo OSS comes from TDL member contributions, any commitment of investment from other user institutions would mark an improvement. The product manager is tasked with creating a framework for financial contributions, but the in-person engagement should allow us to have at least one new contributor within the proposed framework. TDL will be able to track views on the videos when they are posted on YouTube and the TDL Vireo User Documentation wiki. TDL will track views over time.
Total Budget: 20,250
Budget File: pdf
Affiliations: Texas Digital Library, Vireo User Group Steering Committee
LMIE Carveout: The Texas Digital Library does not track OSS users ofa Vireo, all known users are self-reported via engagement with the code and community. For this reason, it’s unclear whether Vireo has been adopted in LMIEs. However, with improvements to the ease with which the Vireo software can be implemented and community engaged, the greater likelihood of attracting LMIE users.
Team Skills: Courtney Mumma, Deputy Director of TDL, is an archivist and librarian with over a decade of experience in open source software and infrastructure hosting in libraries and archives. Kristi Park is the Executive Director of the Texas Digital Library and has been involved in various support and management roles with the Vireo project since its open source release in 2010. Christopher Starcher is the Digital Systems Librarian and an Associate Librarian at Texas Tech University with nearly two decades of experience with digital collections systems in academic libraries. Mr. Starcher currently contributes to the Vireo project as the Product Owner and as a developer.
Submission Number: 192
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