Sustainability Standing Committee

Agenda and Overview

• Summary of recent SSC project sustainability survey and results; plans for following up (see attached ssc_survey_summary)
• Overview of a new SSC/CI workshop on business model options for NSDL, and companion documents (see attached business-options-summary)
• Review of the new NSDL middle-school focus in general, and its implications for upcoming SSC tasks and coordination with other SCs and the CI
• Plans for the election of SSC officers
• Suggestions for new tasks for the SSC in Q4 of 2003
• Feedback from members (especially following up on survey results):

• what do you want from the SSC and the NSDL concerning
• sustainability, and what can you offer to help other projects and the NSDL as a whole?

• Sustainability I: The Projects; Tuesday Oct 14 at 11:00
• Sustainability II: The NSDL; Tuesday Oct 14 at 2:00
• Bird of a Feather: Building the NSDL Community: Organizational Structure and Decision Process; Oct 14 at 4:00 (see attached birds-of-a-feather flyer)

Notes - Sustainability Standing Committee

Attendees:

Notes:

• Review of survey and workshop paper. No discussion of the survey, but several useful suggestions related to adding participants and topics to the workshop (and associated paper).

• New participants: add someone from ERIC (ENC is represented); Nancy suggested to add someone from Library of Medicine, since they have lots of experience with business models for their digital products and collections; perhaps someone from GeoData.gov, since they are working on a public/private partnership (see below).
• New content and topics: Several suggestions implied the workshop should seriously consider several hybrid options where at least a part of NSDL's revenue come through a contract from NSF or other agency to continue doing R&D. It was noted that an exclusive emphasis on payment by end-users, such as subscriptions, would mean NSDL was no longer in the business of doing cutting-edge research (low margins on subscriptions would not support R&D). But clearly there's ample basic and applied DL R&D to do; who will engage in this other than NSDL? Bill Ford also noted that hybrids in the form of public/private partnerships might provide a model for NSDL, since they amount to government sponsored facilities that both provide services to business and do applied research. Geodata.gov was mentioned as a relevant model (see http://geodata.gov/gos).

• Possible new topics (all the following were suggested tentatively, so they should be noted and put them up on the formative list on the website)

• preservation: it's clear that that is important and that some folks think SSC ought to look at this, but on the other hand, a lot of issues are technical and being tackled by CI and Reagan Moore(e.g.); one question is whether this current work get all the functionality the NSDL needs (probably not -- not only are dynamically generated pages missed (and "players" needed to run them not saved) but the broader social side of NSDL and its projects are not included in such archival sweeps. For example, one aspect of preservation that's always been thought to be important, but still not addressed, is managing all the products and knowledge generated within individual projects (e.g., a "post mortem"). Kaye H thinks maybe preservaton should be a workshop topic, looking at it from a social as well as technical perspective (who needs preservation, what stuff should be preserved and, what use is it in the NSDL context?). It was generally agreed that we should list this as a possible SSC task, but also coordinate with others, given its obvious cross-committee implications
• exit interview: Bill Ford, Rachael and other suggested the idea of an interview with projects as they end their NSDL funding cycle. Lots of important questions related to: what you did what state its in?; are you out of all funding or just nsdl?; what succeeded?; what state it the project in now?; what failed?; what next?. It was noted that NSF does have an obligatory project final report, but this would go a lot deeper. The question also come up whether this information should go into the Collaboration Finder, and whether the CF is functional enough to support this. It was noted that this could start in SSC but might naturally become a task force, since all or most of the committees might have their questions to put in. Further, doesn't evaluation have the expertise needed to make this happen?

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