Spring 2020 Samvera Partner Meeting

Meeting ID: 879 420 568

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Meeting ID: 879 420 568

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Relationship with Lyrasis

Status check on appointment of Community Manager and Technical Coordinator (slides)

The Community Manager will be advertised as a remote post. Things will be moved forward as quickly as the hiring freeze at Emory allows. If that becomes problematic we may need to consider an alternative hiring strategy.
We will need to discuss at the October Partner Meeting the relationship with Lyrasis who, long term, would like us to use them as an 'organizational home' - this would be a significantly different arrangement to the current fiscal sponsorship.  We need to agree what we would want out of a relationship and see how that matches what Lyrasis offers as an organizational home - or even if we want such a thing.  Need to be decisions on this by spring next year.

Connect 2020 and 2021 (and maybe 2022) - info and status checks

Connect 2020 in Santa Barbara has been cancelled as the direct result of the COVID-19 pandemic.  A virtual event will be arranged in place of the cancelled face-to-face conference.  See Brian McBride's presentation below for further details.  We plan to hold Connect 2021 at the University of Notre Dame (this was already in the early stages of planning as Rick Johnson's presentation below shows) and UC Santa Barbara hope to stage the event there in 2022.

Connect 2021 Status Update (slides)

Chrissy Rissmeyer

Rick Johnson

5 mins

5 mins

Encouraging contributions to, and participation in, Connect conferences; ideas for format of fall Connect

Program Committee is reviewing how other conferences are dealing with needing to 'go virtual'.  Seeking input from Partners on how the virtual event might look.  Trying to capture all the valued aspects of past f2f Connects: dev congress, plenary, presentations, lightning talks, unconference, Partner meeting - also keep the social component: themed evening dinners, conversations over coffee.  Other conferences are trying a spread over several days, full-day and half-day on line, spread over multiple weeks with only a short (2hr?)presentation time each day. Can we/should we try to multiple track presentations?  Theme days? Topic days?  Trying to get a lot of feedback from the Community to put together something beneficial and to which people will feel welcome. Please everyone take some time to think this through and offer suggestions about how to structure tracks, themes, social components - either own ideas or ideas from other conferences.  What software might we use?  Need a good sample of data from the Community.  Helpful if we could have ideas by the time of the next Program Committee meeting on 7 May.  Plan to refine it and put 2-3 suggestions to the Virtual Connect meeting for consideration and discussion.  Note that having an online conference might bring in people who wouldn't have travelled to Santa Barbara and many of they could be 'newcomers'. Also online may give us an opportunity to try new ideas that we wouldn't couldn't have done in an f2f.

Initial feedback:
Spreading the conference out potentially allows someone to attend more events than they would physically have been able to but that scheduling your calendar becomes more difficult "people schedule over the top of you". 
Small group dinners have usually gone down well - perhaps we should try and make sure there is a social event (or several small ones) especially for new folks.  A "newcomers coffee hour"? 
In considering what CNI did to go virtual we should remember that they needed to arrange something very rapidly and we should realise that they did not have the luxury of a great deal of planning for it.

Contact brian dot mcbride at utah dot edu Slack: Brian McBride

Governance assessment exercise (slides)

Governance Working Group produced a set of six recommendations. Exercise is to go through them and judge how well we are doing in implementing them.  Also going to survey more broadly - people who are interested in Samvera but not highly engaged - how we appear to people outside our Community but that we interact with.  Rank each recommendation in a similar fashion to the 'It takes a Village' report:
**Just getting started
**Making good progress but not yet fully accomplished
**Completed an under periodic review
**Don't know
Particularly wanting to surface any places where there is not a good consensus.

1. Steering will become an elected body from Partners
   Overwhelming majority say 'done' but a handful (including several from Steering) say only 'good progress' (still one more election cycle to complete it).
2. Samvera will hire centralized staff
   8 say just getting started, 21 say making good progress.
   Still some big questions up in the air and we are still uncertain when the first, let alone the second, appointment will be made.  People can't yet plan to take advantage of this staffing. Nevertheless we think we are close to hiring a Community Manager through Emory (despite the COVID problems) - we're closer to finishing that than to just starting.  Hope that the MOU with Lyrasis, which will allow Samvera to transfer the necessary monies to Emory straightforwardly, will be signed 'in the next couple of weeks' so that we could then post the position.  Contribution Model work takes us some way to putting together money for the Tech Coordinator position in the future.
3. Samvera will develop a Contribution Model
   Similar split to (2).  We may have the paperwork but we haven't actually seen the money come in yet and we don't know how that will go. We are making progress towards spring 2022 when the contribution model minimum contribution comes into effect.  The Model was created not expecting a major financial crisis; this year will help us see how the Model can be made more resilient to cope with fluctuating funding situations at institutions in the future.  We probably need to put some thought into how we deal with institutions that genuinely can't meet their minimum in a given year.
4. Partners will establish a Roadmap Council
   19 say completed and under review. Established and doing a lot of good work - looking forward to a Community Manager in place who can help with coordination across the Community.  RC is trying to transition to a body that knows things 'that are going to happen' rather than 'have happened'.  3 say 'making good progress but'.  Not all the Community is coordinating in the way that was envisaged when the Roadmap Council was created.  Several voted 'don't know' - knew that the RC had been formed but not very aware of what it has been doing.  Note that the RC feels they are about coordinating elements of the roadmap - not about creating it. "The reason we don't have a roadmap is that we don't have enough people moving the work forward to justify having one."  A roadmap would need cooperation between Avalon, Hyku and Hyrax "so that everyone is on the same page about what work is getting done."
5. Newly established Steering will update bylaws
   Solid majority for 'completed and under periodic review'.
6. Partners will assess governance at the end of 2019
   Accepting that it is now 2020,..  We are currently engaged in this work and it is not yet complete.  Still need to survey a wider group (see introduction to this segment).  Governance is not a value unto itself, it facilitates the functioning of the Community and we should ensure it is doing that.  The Governance Assessment WG will report back when the wider survey has taken place.  We should probably assess governance on a regular basis.

Parking lot

• Need to discuss resourcing for (software) development work.
• Samvera's next set of recommendations or goals; what goals we should set to achieve
• contributing local code to core code

Email survey?

Code of Conduct review - status check

https://docs.google.com/document/d/17hrlfQtE89zw_N0ccp373JVA29NY_EVZrsdFszK-rdU/edit?usp=sharing