2021-03-31 Meeting notes

Date

Mar 31, 2021

https://emory.zoom.us/j/98259723559?pwd=cFhMOW0rU201QmljM1J1NndNaE11dz09

Participants

• @Heather Greer Klein

• @Lynette Rayle

• @Juliet Hardesty

• @Maxence Gévaudan

Goals/Agenda

• Review and discuss the group goals/objectives, scope, and timeline

• Dev congress annual plan review: what’s missing?

• Discuss our next goal: New contributor support practices

  • practices for highlighting successful contributions and contributors

  • regular opportunities for new contributor support

  • Have we seen anything relevant in other communities?

  • Marketing Group related recognition effort

  • Next steps and action items

  • Schedule next meeting

Notes

• How have things worked in the past - what has worked well and what hasn’t?

  • discuss where we are before making future plans

  • How many partner institutions now? 32

  • How many have actively contributed to Hyrax? Roadmap Alignments WG might have this info based on data they are gathering now (Partner Outreach list to determine if folks are developing on Hyrax right now, so specific to Hyrax)

    • Are these all Hyrax or were some of this involvement pre-Hyrax (Sufia, CurationConcerns)

  • crossover between Samvera and Blacklight community

  • some partners may not work on Hyrax but work on gems used by Hyrax (Notch8, for example)

  • Heather has list of all partners and what they are using and working, so there is something out there we can probably review

  • from Roadmap Alignment outreach, looks like around 25 active partners

  • some places are not partners but are likely to become partners in the next year

  • this is good for understanding potential resources available in the community

• Challenges to participating in community work

  • one-off contributions - putting something into Samvera software takes twice as long as putting it in local software; burdens of review and testing fully

    • review can be less locally so process is much faster

    • limited set of PR reviewers in community so there can be wait time

    • process of making changes, committing, and getting another review is also time consuming

  • determining if thing you want to contribute fits with vision of Hyrax (Tech Lead, PO) - can be hard to figure this out

  • joining WGs - Hyrax Maintenance WG, for example

    • hard to make commitment for small orgs and doesn’t fit priorities of larger orgs with more resources

    • long-term projects don’t line up with what places want to work on (analytics and permissions as examples)

    • project management applied to WGs - sometimes person is technical and sometimes more organizational - having technical vision is important to always include

  • leaders of WGs have been responsible for getting people to participate in WG

    • sometimes that is a mismatch, WG leader might not know who partners are or have the ability to reach out for individual invitations

    • having support that Community Manager has provided for Hyrax Maintenance WG has been essential to get participation

  • would be good to gather points from others in community

  • institutions with fewer resources

    • don’t just have Hyrax to manage

    • providing immediate fix and unsure if it is contributable (working in languages other than Rails and making it work for their needs)

    • institutions working in other languages - many problems dealing with translations

    • local customizations make it difficult to update to newer code versions (migration)

    • issues of time, energy, and skill

• Need for pairing for people new to working in the community that can help with some issues, such as setting things up for migrating

• Languages - might be good to consider a PO for something like this (similar to core component POs) - someone to coordinate this work

• Samvera Technical Coordinator role could help with this but it is not a thing yet

• Dev Congress in May 2021 - might have a topic dealing with improving translations; not in the topic list yet but would be good addition; might have been suggested in Slack

• one idea from this group is having Dev Congress more often and regularly

• need for documentation in other languages? Yes!!! Samvera.github.io for sure; Github wiki also exists but not sure if translation support is there

  • chat in Slack can be a challenge to use for some

  • maybe language-specific channels in Slack? DSpace has language-specific channels

  • could help to build language-specific coding community; convincing places to use something like Hyrax, not just IT question but also librarians and people working with data - they might not be as open to something that isn’t available in the language they speak

• Virtual Connect WG update

  •  

Action items

Decisions