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Richard's suggestions
Chris's suggestions
Ryan's pedantic responses
General
- What is Samvera?
-A community and a technology stack. or solution? for managing access to digital objects/materials. Samvera is a community driven framework for creating digital asset management systems and well-described repositories of digital objects.
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-Content that is designed to be available and accessible works better in a repository. Lack of preservation capable functionality?
-management and curation by library professionals with an eye toward permanance, assurances of best practices and pathways towards preservation
- What does Samvera give us that DSpace/EPrints/ContentDM/Islandora, etc. doesn't?
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Hyrax utilizes the Samvera framework to provide users with a base-level IR solution that can be customized, allowing for easier upgrades and better sustainability as the users are not working with an entirely home-grown DAMS or IR. HyKu is a multi-tenant version of Hyrax that allows for an organization to host multiple instances of Hyrax at scale - example: A vendor could use HyKu to run a single instance which would be home to multiple customers utilizing the same Fedora, Valkyrie and core components but display entirely locally with local control for customers. Sufia is a predecessor of Hyrax - and while it continues to exist at some institutions, Hyrax is a combination of Sufia, Curation Concerns 
and original development work from the Samvera community.
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Rather than going it alone, we consider this shared work to greatly benefit us as for every bit we give, there are 30-off odd other universities similarly giving of their time and enhancing Samvera. While we could create a stand-alone system, we'd be doing it ourselves, and the expense of maintaining something custom, over the longrun, would outstrip the occasional costs of Samvera participation. The 90's taught us all a lot of bad habits for localized software development rather than working with others to ensure multiple hands were in play to keep a system going and improving.
- Why are we giving things away? (with regard to community contributions of many kinds, not just code)
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-I suppose we should get clarity from the Governance Model WG before drafting a response to this. This will more likely come from the Contribution Model WG: at present it goes Partner/Member of the Community (adopter, kicking the tires etc)/Supporter (likely an adopter who contributes cash but does little else for the Community)
Samvera has multiple open Interest and Working Groups contributing at different levels of the technology stack. Work is managed in concert with other users to ensure a "one size fits all" approach. Likewise, the Samvera Community has working groups that manage the community itself.
- What is expected of a community member? in terms of time? resources?
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- Where can I try/download Samvera?
All the software is available through the community's github site at https://github.com/samvera. Documentation is available at http://samvera.github.io/. A test instance of Hyrax is made available by DCE at https://nurax.curationexperts.com/
- My institution/organisation is moving more and more stuff into the cloud. Can I have Samvera in the cloud?
Hyku was created specifically to work in the cloud as a multi-tenanted solution for delivering repository solutions. There is a Hyku Interest Group that is taking forward the development of Hyku for use in this context.
- Does Samvera meet good standards of accessibility/security/...?
The Hyrax gem, which is the basis of most Samvera systems at the moment, has undergone an external accessibility audit. A few minor issues were found which are currently being addressed. - How stable is the code?
- Who else is using it? and how?
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