[Dspace-general] Announcement on DSpace Executive Director

[MacKenzie Smith]

Dear DSpace community,

Many of you will recall last year's DSpace Federation Governance 
Advisory Board,
chaired by Chris Rusbridge (DCC), convened by Ann Wolpert (MIT Libraries),
and Nick Wainwright (HP Labs), and described here
http://wiki.dspace.org/index.php//DspaceGovernance
 
That group's work led to a set of recommendations including an 
architectural review
(completed late last year) and the creation of a new, non-profit 
organization to
oversee future governance of the DSpace community.

I am happy to report that we are making good progress on establishing 
the new
non-profit organization, and I would like to take this opportunity to 
announce that
Michele Kimpton has accepted the position as Executive Director for the 
organization.
The DSpace non-profit corporation will initially provide organizational, 
legal and
financial support for the DSpace open source software project. Prior to 
joining
DSpace, Michele Kimpton was one of the founding Directors at Internet 
Archive,
in charge of Web archiving technology and services. The Internet Archive 
is a
not-for-profit organization in California, www.archive.org. During her 
time at
Internet Archive Michele initiated and managed several open source software
projects to collect, access and preserve web pages.

Michele developed an organization within Internet Archive to help 
support and
fund open source software and web archiving programs, so she comes to us 
with
a lot of experience in both open source software and long-term digital 
curation.
Her organization worked primarily with National Libraries and Archives 
around
the world, so she is familiar with large, widely diverse and distributed 
communities.
Michele was one of the co-founders of the IIPC ( International Internet 
Preservation
Consortium, netpreserve.org), whose mission is to work collaboratively 
to develop
tools, standards and processes for archiving and preservation of web 
material.

The DSpace non-profit corporation is in the final stages of completing 
filing status
as a not-for-profit corporation of Massachusetts. By summer 2007 we 
expect to
have this legal entity in place, and a complete Board of Directors. Both 
MIT and
Hewlett Packard have provided the start up funding to establish the 
organization
over the next several years. The organization will reside initially on 
the MIT campus.
Over the next six months Michele will be talking with members of the DSpace
community to help formulate the strategy for what organizational support 
would be
helpful and needed from the DSpace organization. You can contact Michele
directly at Michele at dspace.org.

Thank you for your continuing support of the DSpace project,

MacKenzie

-- 
MacKenzie Smith
Associate Director for Technology
MIT Libraries