2024-09-20 Board Meeting Agenda & Minutes

Attendees

@Karen Cariani

@Aaron Collier

@Kirsten Leonard

@Kate Lynch

@Emily Lynema

@Alicia Morris

@Robin Ruggaber

@david.schober

Ex-officio:

@Heather Greer Klein

@Esmé Cowles

Agenda

Changes to the agenda - none
Board Election - begin full election cycle now rather than November
1. Seats are Karen, Kirsten, and Tamsin’s vacant seat. Karen and Kirsten can run for re-election
2. Suggest we open nominations ASAP, promote them at regional meetings/do direct outreach for candidates, and set the ballot opening for the end of October.
3. Board approves this schedule
Community metrics
1. Will bring for more discussion at the next Partner call
2. Can we provide more “hard data” about community growth as a proxy for health and sustainability, to talk to a group about Hyku as a consortial option
3. Are there numbers we should collect and report for the annual report/state of Samvera? Can be clearer about # of known institutions with installations for example, and number known with installations in process
4. Development contribution numbers or description of contributions in a given year per institutions; we have metrics for GitHub commits over the last couple of years, and share those. Also board numbers, IG/WG participation, new Partners, other types of contributions. Slack channel acitivity, tech call process, cross channel talk and help is a strength of the community. We also don’t just support one piece of software.
5. Value of developers talking across institutions is not always recognized. Also the commitment to documentation, website, overall outreach to attract new participants
6. Can dig into Slack for additional metrics to talk about participation
7. Successful succession planning, governance execution. Addressing concerns about institutions who leave the community. What our challenges are, and how we are addressing them.
8. Robin will share info from the UVA market scan
9. be really clear about how we talk about installs, and who is using what. Want to include for example Serverless IIIF (350 installs), how the consortial model changes contributions in Hyku, and institutional contributions that aren’t being counted as such because they are coming through service providers
10. Substantial growth in people using the software, regular updates across the software, and new ways to contribute even when large institutions are doing something different, but contributing their smaller pieces (Valkyrie, Serverless IIIF, etc).
11. Promotion opportunity for these other services
12. https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/publicsector/northwestern-university-libraries-make-research-more-efficient-accessible-with-aws-lambda/
13. Close relationship with Blacklight, IIIF, Fedora communities
Privacy Statement on the website, and checking on other policies needed for InfraFinder entries
1. We have a privacy statement from 2020 that we can update, suggest we review and update and post on the samvera.org website (currently in the community repository as a document)
2. Other potential policies not included now:
  1. Web Accessibility Statement - “A document that declares the level of compliance of a service with the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG), which are standards for making web content accessible to people with disabilities.”
    1. Can be part of Accessibility Interest Group work
  2. Open API - “Publicly and freely available Application Programming Interface (API)”
    1. IOI says any API that is documented counts
  3. Open Data Statement - “A document that declares the availability and accessibility of the data used or produced by the service.” - code license is sufficient
Julie Allinson Award - proposal to change nomination process
1. short form for soliciting the award nominees in 2025, rather than asking for a letter
PALs IMLS Grant
1. IMLS Grant
  - FYI, this document exists to update the interest group on Hyku IMLS activities
  - Wrapping up: Collaboration Activity: Research previous practices in open-source collaboration
  - Working on statements of work for:
  - Molly Reed is doing a web audit and working on an infographic to explain the grant activities/outputs
  - Email join our community steering committee
Daniel’s exit interview with David and Kate
1. Excellent reflections from Daniel on his time in the Hyrax Tech Lead role
2. Excellent role for leadership development; challenging to recruit but an excellent opportunity for the individual and the institution, even for a junior developer
3. Want to add a biannual meeting with board reps in addition to weekly meetings with Heather, who was a great support
4. We should be sure to give the technical lead one real thing to drive toward (like the Valkyrization work was)
For discussion next meeting: draft 2025 budget (may have updates from Cathie before finance subcommittee meeting)
1. Finance subcommittee will review Oct 11; full Board October 14; present to Partners/share to Partner email list on Nov 8th
2. includes the 5% dues increase to Partners
Other Updates
1. 2024 invoice payments
2. Regional meetings
  1. Midwest meeting agenda, unconference topics
3. Additional attorney fees from 2022 trademark moving
  1. $4,129.72 overdue invoices that were sent to non-existant DuraSpace address instead of us, until May 2024. All work related to moving and re-registering the trademarks (Heather checked for duplicate invoicing)
4. Latest on potential new Partners
  1. Expect additional Partnership completed by the end of the year
  2. Will include a conservative estimate in the budget for adding a Partner in 2025
5. Community repository upgrade work from SoftServ
  1. Planning to deploy the Valkyrization for Adventist and Pals in the next couple of weeks, and will then deploy it for community repo (should be in October or November at the latest).
Date of next Board meeting: October 14th, 2024 - hybrid in person at Princeton, 4pm ET