In the fall of 2024, the Aspen Governance Task Force was collectively charged with creating a proposed governance model for the Aspen Discovery Project. Governance is to ensure the long-term technical and financial sustainability of the software, its documentation, and its development processes. Our original plan, and our hope, was to conclude this process by the end of July, 2025. At its conclusion, the task force was charged with recommending a governance model and providing documents to the Aspen Community
Over the last 9 months the task force has investigated joining the Open Library Foundation, we have studied the governance bylaws of other organizations, we have discussed possible changes to the software release cycle, and we have developed a draft set of bylaws for the proposed Aspen Library Software Foundation.
In June of 2025 we shared the proposed bylaws for this organization and we asked for feedback from the community. We have incorporated that feedback into a final draft available here:
Aspen Library Software Foundation GovernanceAdditionally, the task force created a guide to these bylaws that may answer questions you may have about the bylaws. The guide is available here:
Guide to Bylaws for the Aspen Library Software FoundationThe last step in adopting these bylaws is to ask members of the Aspen Library Software community to approve these bylaws.
Please fill out the following survey to show us whether or not you approve these bylaws.
