2025-08-15 Board Meeting Agenda & Minutes

Attendees

@Karen Cariani

@Aaron Collier

@Kirsten Leonard

@Kate Lynch

@Emily Lynema

@Alicia Morris - regrets

@Robin Ruggaber

@david.schober

@Paul Walk

Ex-officio:

@Heather Greer Klein

Reminder: Inviting tech leads and POs to the September 19th meeting

Agenda

• Changes to the agenda?
  
  

• State of current and potential Partners

  • Recent challenges at a Partner institution

  • Remaining outstanding invoices

  • Current Partners activity check

  • Potential Partners progress

  • Are there high net worth individuals who could contribute? Operational grants - Arcadia?

  • Ideas for making it easier to try out the software, engage with the community, communicate existing value:

  • Esme volunteered to help with an AUL to AUL letter outreach campaign

  • Kate: an interactive workshop, more opportunities to interact with the software. Promoting and better automating the sandbox opportunity for people to try things out when doing an opportunity scan.

  • difference between the sandbaox and the testing sites

  • Several overlapping concerns here; a sandbox, a showcase (looking at this for Antleaf for data repository features), a technical easy-to-install opportunity nailed down for developers.

  • Getting started running on Docker has gotten easier, likely just need to better communicate that in the readme for Hyrax
    
    

• Drafty proposals/ideas from Heather

  • Heather proposes cutting her time and salary for 2026, using funds to fill specific technical coordination needs

    • Could be done proactively and while it is by choice, down to 4 days per week

    • Need to prevent additional loss of Partnerships by showing their value

    • Add benefits appealing to short-term-focused leadership

    • AUL-level outreach campaign - Who do we reach with a message about value, and how?

  • Need to fund technical expertise that is currently missing or will be in 2026

    • Need to determine exactly what would be the highest priorities, to find the best approach to fill those needs. Contractors and/or shared staff.

    • Front end development: websites suffering, and a modern Hyku homepage design is in demand

    • Hyrax Tech Lead role will be vacant; Hyku positions will need a funding plan beyond the grant

    • Other community-level technical coordination would be valuable to nail down the best strategy for alignment over a specific course of time

      • Document with the beginning of a list of what we are missing in cross-community technical coordination

      • Have we done any membership modeling? Kirsten can help with that, looking at what adding and losing partners at different levels.

      • Can we show value with technical support and coordination, that will help everyone, but can’t be offered without adopter support

      • Expanding globally for partnership

      • Can we show better “here’s where your $$ goes” that breaks out explicitly where funds go, make it more tangible to people. Safety and security of millions of objects around the world, and show the value of that. Some way to show that on the website. How many resources are preserved, how many are accessed, etc are the value provided by this “free” software.

        • Molly can help with this, doing it right now for PALNI

      • How many Datacite/CrossRef DOIs point to resources in Samvera repositories?

      • Ongoing conversation for this community for a long time! A core person at each partner often makes the annual case for partnership. How do you help make those internal arguments better. Something at their fingertips. This argument will never be behind us, just keeps coming up all the time forever with stakeholders when they turn over, or if the person in the role leaves

      • We do ask people to contribute their messaging to their funders so other people can leverage - at least an structure or argument. and some time every year - even with the same person when the org changes in some major way

      • Maybe create a Slack subchannel for communicating with stakeholders

      • Emphasis of what the migration and vendor cost would be for a commercial product. Maybe numbers of cost effectiveness, This is only x% of the overall dept budget and we get x$ in value

      •  

  • Other funding sources

    • Partnership: facing a big cut

    • Grants: from whom?

    • Reserve funds
      
      

• Samvera Connect 2025 update

  • Scholarships - Board approved recipients to notify today

  • Registration

  • Schedule

  • Keynote in progress
    
    

• Agenda items for next month’s call

  • Invited tech leads and POs to the September 19th call

  • Preliminary 2026 budget, regional meeting location scouting/planning, technical coordination definitions and budgeting
    
    

• In-person Partner meeting agenda items

  • 90 min at Connect
    
    

• Other updates

  • AI working group draft charter - excellent and well scoped, looking for feedback.
    
    

• Date of next Board meeting: September 19th, w/ Product Owners and Tech Leads