SB January 2022 virtual winter meeting

Review Partner goals for 2022, themes (from https://docs.google.com/document/d/1PqmOATpO1a0-_sA2s29CNhkz54QQktjpVv0hz2Kmlmg/edit?usp=sharing ). What kind of Community activities could support these in the short and medium term?

The discussion of the three areas of greatest interest: research data, open access publishing, Hyrax Valkyrization – we don’t have anything organized around the first two themes. What could we do for the community around these themes?

ACTION: Heather will do a deep dive into current research data management in Samvera and share it at a Partners call to gauge interest for a group. Can also use that information for a blog post and enhanced documentation for the research data management use case. Who is working on this, who has done the work and their challenges.

Engage metadata group around research data descriptive metadata – so difficult because of the variety. Would like to hear from metadata folks.

ACTION: good topic for the Partner meeting in spring to determine any collective next steps. Esme and Nabeela will ask in Slack and lead a conversation at the Partner spring meeting.

Medium-term, there are interesting technical areas around controlled digital lending and the role of APIs on the Samvera Stack.

Interest in controlled digital lending but such a new space, thorny area for what the standards are and interoperability. Also can be difficult to initiate the conversation at institutions.

Boston Library Consortium has a grant for system-agnostic lending. Standards work is beginning to happen. Lots of early stage conversations are likely happening. Samvera may not be the obvious fit but good to see where the community is on this topic.

Might want to encourage use by consortiums as a digital object platform. Could also make it a gem that could be added to Hyrax easily to make a CDL system. PALNI/PALCI may also be able to tell use about CDL in their communities.

Worth thinking of this as a community of practice in this context as well.

ACTION Alicia will talk to BLC about their plans.

APIs: just agreeing on what the APIs are could be valuable. A gem for APIs could be useful as well. Meadow and Figgy use API gems.

Other aspect that is interesting is shifting development out of Ruby and towards Javascript. Community has been defined as related to Ruby code, so this could shift a bit. Javascript front end work is bigger in scope potentially. Amorphous, not clear what we can do with this.

Would be interested in temp check: is this a direction to promote? Anxious about the work involved. Could expand the community and are others okay with that? A Separate front end has helped Northwestern tremendously. Gives other ways to interact, and no downtime.

In future, what would it mean to transition to another technology? And what the community is? Likely a 10 year problem. But do see APIs as a way to make that less traumatic. Possible working group?

Option to gather information and present to Partners call to say, here is what people are doing. See if there is interest in setting a standard or developing a gem, or something else.

ACTION Esme and a Northwestern volunteer will gather API info and present to Partners.

@Esmé Cowles

Partner feedback on how Samvera can help over the next 2-5 years

The group discussed the common theme of what sustainability means for the Samvera Community, including:

• Is there anything Samvera is doing now that we should not be doing in the next 2-5 years?

• Samvera as a community of communities; the Labs process; value to Partners

• We are a truly collaborative partner supported, well governed, not tied to an institution, have a staff member. We focus on collaboration.

• projects that Partners are already doing in addition to Samvera. How can we reduce overhead for Partners?

@Simeon Warner

General Community updates

@Heather Greer Klein

Partner participation and expectations

The group had a great discussion about what Partner participation means, and how to ensure all Partners are receiving value for the Community, and how to identify if a Partner is participating less because of local concerns and regular ebb and flow of work vs one individual’s interest or declining value of participation. Discussed how to measure and monitor engagement and how to incentivize and show gratitude for that engagement.

@Rosalyn Metz

Wrap-up

@Heather Greer Klein

Question came up in Marketing WG regarding marketing products vs marketing the Community. How to better communicate this and communicate the whole of the Community and the value provided to varied institutions and goals.

The WG will need to help with a website refresh and it is important to know what what to focus on. The group reflected on the previous day’s discussion about our values, Samvera as a community of practice. Discussed the inevitability of technology changes and the balance between promoting specific technologies that could meet current needs, and Samvera as a value to those who want engagement with a community, to promote and sustain healthy open source, and engage with others on development of what comes next – we move technology forward.

Discussed common misconceptions of development at large vs small vs no development teams – big institutions love to feel benevolent when it is easy, but it is not a reliable long term plan for maintenance. Also, big institutions won’t up and leave if samvera is an environment that makes room for what is next.

Marketing group was looking at institutional profiles. Could use that to promote why different types of institutions are part of Samvera. The many roots of the samvera tree – a series of blog posts that then live on the website as profiles. Why a partner is here and what they are looking to in the future. Annual report profiles can be used as well for the website.

• ITAV pilot could help as well with community value discussion

• On the website: the vision statement is still okay but we need to update the blurb we use for the technology stack. We could change that relatively soon. How it works section: "Samvera maintains a set of Ruby on Rails components (Ruby gems) that, together, can be used to build flexible and extensible digital repository solutions. Hyrax combines a number of these components into a toolkit (a Rails engine) for building repository applications to meet a wide range of repository requirements, whilst Hyku is an out-of-the-box repository application with multi-tenant capability built on Hyrax."

• could be rewritten about the many ways you can use the technology in the community – from working on what is next to working with a service provider

• can be more holistic in marketing

• can invite new partners into the marketing working group especially

• make it clear one can participate without being bound to the technology

• check in with the community about hyrax after valkyrization, once it has been taken up and see if it solves some of the lingering/outstanding problems. Big thing to make sure to communicate. A good time to look at a lot of things we can’t do until that implementation is done.

@Nabeela Jaffer

Partner Value
How to communicate that there is value in the Community to Partners who don’t currently contribute to Community code/use Samvera tech. Internal Partner concerns that if too many large institutions go their own way, there will be no one available to maintain the code.

How do Partners find value if not using/supporting the code?

• Community, relationships, investment in productive useful healthy open source

How does it help the community to have those partners?

• community participation, funding through dues, culture of helping others, lots of Slack question participation

• How do we communicate, convincingly, that large institutions find value in their partnership even if their technologies change frequently. Partners and leadership won’t abandon technologies, we will do something about it if a product looks like it is stalling out.

• what’s the story we tell? We’re a different kind of collaboration. Real participatory collaboration. How are we transitioning from development focused to engaging in other ways.

• to discuss later: how to identify early if a technology is not maintained

• we have never presented on commitment to open source, and also what does maintenance mean – leadership at high levels don’t understand what maintenance actually is

• http://project-types.github.io where is the future for the core technology and the broader scope.

• A conversation will be planned with Partners about these ideas, acknowledging these strengths, communicating them more widely.

@Hannah Frost

Technical coordinator role discussion

The group discussed the need for a Hyrax Tech Lead, the challenging nature of the role for a volunteer, and ways to support a part time Partner staff-based Tech Lead for one year, and how to plan to sustain the role beyond one year. Also discussed was the end of Julie Hardesty’s role as Hyrax PO in October and finding a volunteer for the role by the summer. Further investigation will be done by the Finance Subcommittee, and a proposal and discussion will be held at a future Partner call.

@Carolyn Caizzi

Wrap up
Items for the February agenda: website refresh; What does it mean that Partner contribution will be required in 2022?

@Heather Greer Klein