2023-05-17 Outreach & Engagement notes

Date

May 17, 2023

Participants

• @Chris Awre

• Molly Reed

• @Karen Cariani

• @Kirsten Leonard

• @Kevin Kochanski

• @Alicia Morris

• regrets (from Costa Rica): @Heather Greer Klein

Agenda

Notes

Review mottos:  https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/16b10trFY-hJ1U1XCZWERGkFkiXWwHVnlJecwta-_xhc/edit#gid=0

Top Four:

• Growing open technologies together

  • This was shortlisted by three of us initially but saw some further interest in the light of the discussion.

  • Key were two elements: the idea of something growing, and the reference to open technologies. The idea of using the word ’together' also resonated, with Samvera meaning ‘togetherness’ in Icelandic. The phrasing is also nice and snappy.

  • A question raised about reference to open technologies was whether this might be too broad. Samvera is creating precisely this, albeit in a quite focused field.

• Collaboratively powering the future of knowledge sharing

  • This was shortlisted by four of us, and again generated some further interest from discussion.

  • The different components each resonated: we are collaborative, we are powering each other to achieve our goals, and we are concerned with the future of knowledge sharing and enabling that. So there is a certain ‘it does what says on the tin’ aspect to this.

  • It was also agreed that it is quite long for a motto and doesn’t easily slip off the tongue in the way a motto needs to. [CA - afterthought: might it be a tag line for the website instead]

• Growing open knowledge together

  • This was also shortlisted by four of us on the call, though discussion seemed to lessen this a bit as we digested what it might be saying.

  • It generated some comments on the spreadsheet (not repeated here) that highlighted that the attraction of this motto is that it encapsulates why we are working with repositories, to enable the growth of knowledge and making that available. It also captured the ‘growing’ and ‘together’ themes of the first one above, and has the same snappiness, whilst focusing on the knowledge rather than the technology

  • The discussion considered two aspects: not all the knowledge in Samvera repositories is open, so we may be setting ourselves up for critique on that; and there is no mention of technologies.

• Repositories with roots/Repositories with community roots

  • This was the most popular of those shortlisted by those on the call, selected by five of us. This was for ‘Repositories with roots’ and the alternative adding the word ‘community’ was arrived at on on the call.

  • This motto it was felt was closest to home with its reference to repositories, and also has the very nice link to the Samvera logo through use of ‘roots’. Whilst something with roots implies community, the addition of community was to emphasise this further. Considered to the snappiest of the suggestions.

  • The use of roots could be interpreted as fixed in the ground, and therefore maybe not innovative.

Overall, the sense was that there were some good contributions here, and each of those brought something really positive to what we’d like to say about ourselves. Taking this forward, we need to agree on whether we wish to focus on the community aspect of Samvera (which the current motto sort of does currently) or the technologies (in some way, whether broad or specific) or the purpose of curating knowledge which is why we work with repositories, or some mixture of these.

[Postscript, on reflection from writing up the notes - Empowering the future of knowledge sharing together]

Thoughts:

• What sits alongside “If you want to go far, go together” vs. replacing it?

• What helps invite new audiences to the Community?

• We’ve evaluated what does a bit of branding along with community goals

• The one that hits the invitation mark, would get new audiences engaged, may be “Collaboratively powering the future of knowledge sharing,” with the hook of looking to the future

Hyku Outreach feedback and Samvera.org :

• Feedback from Hyku for Consortia is that Hyku isn’t easy to find on Samvera.org , and that the other Hyku sites aren’t prominent in Google searches.

• We should consider making the technology a bigger part of Samvera.org , bringing Hyku information there, and fostering some unity in the sub-communities vs. having siloed spaces.

  • Hyku.samvera.org doesn’t seem to be on the same domain, can we incorporate it and make it easier to update

  • Hyku.samvera.org is currently a Jekyll site that requires pushing code

• Need to pick up the conversation with Heather about how users can update the new site, how that can be collaborative.

• In general, the external (Hyrax and Hyku, at least) are not kept up to date because they are siloed. Integrating things will keep things consistent.