Hello Leaders,  

Thanks to everyone who joined the Leaders Forum on October 19. For those who missed it, here is a summary. 

Our keynote speaker, Dr. Marcus Collins, offered a unique view on the challenges and opportunities in open source software in large part because he’s not from the world of cultural and scientific heritage. He’s a marketing professor and practitioner (BOOO, right? – Wrong!). He had such a fresh perspective on how we evaluate, justify, use, support, and fund OSS.  

Marcus talked about how to leverage culture as a vehicle to influence the future of open source technology. He says the choices we make about the products we implement and/or procure is heavily driven by culture, more so than by value proposition. At the core of culture are principles, values, or a way of thinking. It made me wonder what it would look like if we start with culture in our support of OSS. How would we approach Deans and Provosts? Speak to our colleagues and peers?  Make decisions about implementation?  

Marcus says it starts with three simple questions: 1) What do we believe? 2) How do we exercise our beliefs (and what he didn’t say but I heard was: how do we not exercise our beliefs?) and 3) How do we communicate it? Our ecosystem has a strong, established cultural framework and we need to tap into the authentic parts of that culture to inspire a different kind of support for OSS in the future.  

If you want to relive the glory of Marcus’ presentation, titled More Than Words, check out the session recordings in our new LYRASIS Learning Library: https://lyrasis.aviaryplatform.com/p/c2hhcmUxNzk=. The recordings also include wonderful lightning talks about the small steps one OSS community is taking toward inclusion and anti-racism and about how the established best practices of open source software development aligns with open science.  

One more thing. We had a blast debating what research topic to select for 2022. We narrowed the ballot down to three topics: 1) Community Engagement, 2) Researcher Infrastructure, and Virtual Reality/Artificial Intelligence. Be sure to complete the survey to choose the 2022 research topic! The ballot will be open until November 1, 2021.

Erin Tripp,
Director, LYRASIS Research and Innovation Division