Community Incubation: Educopia and the STEPS Model

From the Lyrasis website: “The overall goal of the ‘It Takes a Village’ project is to create a report which will document current practices for sustaining open source initiatives, create a sustainability roadmap to provide paths for planning and assessment for new and existing projects, and provide a resource allocation guide for each phase of an open source software project’s life cycle.

In October 2017, Lyrasis convened close to 50 stakeholders from open source software initiatives that serve cultural heritage organizations to elucidate characteristics and forms of sustainability models as well as factors affecting sustainability.”

As part of the larger Forum conversation, Educopia staff presented on our “Community STEPS model.”

The model addresses the following questions:

How can we help communities develop?
How do we foster a healthy community?
How do we demonstrate our viability?
How do we grow fast (or fail fast!)?
What structure(s) do we need for continued impact?