From its inception as Hydra, Samvera has been designed to provide a generalizable, portable framework that would meet the needs not only of the three original institutions, but also those of a wider community. Originating as a multi-institutional project spanning three universities (Hull, Stanford and Virginia), and with support from Fedora Commons, Samvera has since expanded to include like-minded institutions with similar needs, technical infrastructures and complementary systems.
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Community Structure and Responsibilities
Adopters
Samvera is committed to being free and open source software. Adopters are members of the Samvera Community who use the software. The Community would not be what it is without adopters. Adoption, and all kinds of contributions big and small, can build toward Partnership.
Partnership
Samvera Partners are individuals, institutions, corporations or other groups that have formally committed to contributing to the Samvera Community. Samvera Partners collectively advance the project and the Community for the benefit of all participants.
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By investing financially in Samvera’s future, Partners help ensure the longevity of the Community and its software. By contributing to Samvera’s Working and Interest Groups, and by having staff participate in the further development of our code and solutions, Partners protect their own investment in our products and services.
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- The right to vote in formal Samvera decision making (one vote per Partner institution)
- The right to put up candidates for election to the Samvera Steering Group
- The right to attend Partner meetings and Partner calls
- The right to advance information about any security vulnerabilities discovered in Samvera software (via the Partners’ closed mailing list)
- Centrally coordinated legal and financial services relating to
- Rights management
- Financial stewardship
- Legal issues (including trademark)
- Marketing (including website and wiki)
- An annual Samvera Connect conference
- An annual Samvera Virtual Connect
- Access to the services of any Samvera appointed employees to help further local Samvera initiatives
- Public acknowledgement of Partnership in/on appropriate publicity materials (including the website and wiki)
In addition, there are less tangible, but potentially important, aspects to Samvera Partnership. For instance, many of our Partners have been successful in obtaining grants from philanthropic funds to assist and/or enhance the development of their local systems. An institution’s involvement in a larger community, and a commitment to feeding back developments for the wider benefit, can be seen to support the case for grant funding. The track record of Samvera Partners in successfully delivering the outputs of their respective grants and contributing those back to community solutions may be seen as a further benefit.
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- Electing representatives to the Steering Group
- Community maintenance and growth
- Collaborative roadmapping (technical & community)
- Samvera application development
- Governance of, maintenance of and code contribution to the core components
- Design contribution: UI's, API's, data models, et al.
- Documentation and sharing of contributions, eg. through http://samvera.github.io/
- Community infrastructure provisioning & support (Bug trackers, Continuous Integration Servers, Web site, Wiki, etc.)
- Maintenance of the official Samvera website
- Resource coordination
- Recruitment
- Community advocacy (e.g., public speaking, writing articles)
- Participation and leadership in "Interest Groups" and "Working Groups" within the Samvera Community
- Meeting organization & planning
- Determining Community strategy
In January 2020, the Partners decided to adopt a financial Contribution Model to replace the system of voluntary donations that had previously been in place. The intention is that the increased revenue generated should be used both to fund the Community’s annually recurrent expenditure and to hire a full time Community Manager. Ultimately it is hoped that it will also be possible to hire a Technical Manager. The minimum level of contribution is determined by the size of the Partner organization.
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Partners sign a formal one page Letter of Agreement (LoA) in support of the formal and legal Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) signed by the Steering Group in April 2012 (see below). Additionally, each Partner is asked at the time of joining the group to write a brief letter of intent indicating why they want to become a Samvera Partner and what they intend to contribute to the Community. (Note that we post these letters publicly in the wiki.) Partners are also required to have on file a corporate Contributor License Agreement (see Samvera Community Intellectual Property Licensing and Ownership page) to ensure that the Community can accept code and other intellectual contributions from the Partner institution. A composite document comprising the 2012 MoU, amendments made to it in 2018 to reflect the name change from Hydra to Samvera, changes made in 2019 to reflect governance changes in the Community, a version of the MoU showing the effect of these amendments, and a blank Letter of Agreement can be found here.
How to stop being a Samvera Partner
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The current membership of the Samvera Steering Group can be found Samvera Steering Group membership.
The current set of Bylaws governing the operation of the Steering Group can be found here.
Samvera Code Development
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Join the samvera-tech group and mailing list listed on our Get In Touch page
Join the #dev channel on the Samvera slack organization - find instructions on the Get In Touch page
Submit code to the Community (see guidelines), contribute resources to the group, and engage in the technical development process.
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All Samvera code is distributed under an open source license (Apache 2.0 as of 2013), and Contributor License Agreements (CLA's) based on the Apache Foundation CLA's are required from contributors before their code can be added to the Community's code base. See the Samvera Community Intellectual Property Licensing and Ownership page for more details.
Our code development is overseen and coordinated by a number of groups. The Roadmap Council exists Roadmaps Alignment Group exists to align the roadmaps of the various Samvera code initiatives where this makes sense. The council comprises the product owners of the core Samvera components and Solution Bundles and of representatives from relevant Interest or Working Groups. The essential elements of the Samvera code are maintained by the Core Components Maintenance Group which is devoted to the ongoing maintenance of identified core components via planned sprints organized in communication with the product owners. Hyrax, the repository toolkit that underpins other solution bundles has two key working groups: one for coordinating development, and another for its roadmap. Our solution bundles (Hyku and Avalon) each have their own development teams responsive to the needs of, and advised by, their users.
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