In late April, I attended an invitational Symposium in Atlanta, GA.  This meeting was organized by LYRASIS as the first meeting around Supporting Cultural Heritage Open Source Software (SCHOS).  The group consisted of community leaders from libraries, archives, museums and other cultural heritage organizations. This invitational symposium considered issues that impact open source software support and sustainability, consider characteristics of successful strategies, and explore ways for projects and institutions to collaborate on sustainability.

This was a working meeting where participants listened to a panel of speakers around three key topics, listed below, and then broke out into small group sessions where we had an hour long discussion about issues and suggestions on how we can move forward.   

• Topic 1: Support, Outreach, and Funding for Sustainability
• Topic 2: Adopter Needs
• Topic 3: Governance Models

From this meeting, LYRASIS will be creating a white paper and will be hosting a community-wide webinar to follow up, share some of what came out of the discussion, and generally fostering a broader discussion of the topics that evolved from the symposium.

I am working with Karl Fogel on the governance models for successful (and not successful) open source projects in the Cultural Heritage environment.