2026-01-15 Board Meeting Agenda & Minutes

@Aaron Collier

@Juliet Hardesty

@Annamarie Klose

@Kirsten Leonard

@Kate Lynch

@Christine Peterson

@Paul Walk

Ex-officio:

@Heather Greer Klein - regrets

Agenda

• Changes to the agenda?

  • Thank you Kate!
    
    

• Apereo call: reflections, timeline

  • Notes from the call

  • draft of bylaws with potential changes for Apereo

    • Question: Does the new Technical Coordinator become an employee of Apereo like the Community Manager? No - this would just be a contracted position (although the contract will be with Apereo).

    • Question: are we losing the Treasurer role? – We can keep, change, or redefine this role however we would like. It doesn’t have to be as formal as a Treasurer. This could be a chair of a finance subcommittee, for example. Apereo leaves this to the project to define.

      • What do we need for fiscal oversight? – can maintain a board fiscal subcommittee for budget creation, reporting.

    • Question: do have (or need) access to some legal counsel to review this process? Can this be provided by Oasis? – Heather will send the template agreement to OASIS for review.

    • Samvera will not become an Apereo Member. Samvera Partners could become Apereo Members if they wanted to. – Apereo considers contributors to projects as a type of member. Would want to make sure this is clear for Partners and other contributors.

    • Open question about health insurance for Community Manager (cost and coverage) – will discuss this with Apereo after submitting the application.

    • What about infrastructure

      • Making sure we are covered – currently we pay directly for all our infrastructure, none connected to OASIS.

      • Disruption to community? – no disruption has been identified as of yet

      • is any of this being provided by Oasis?

        • Confluence wiki? – we have this as a free OSS project license, independent of fiscal sponsor

        • Does Apereo provide anything? – will give us the option to use some of their infrastructure (BigBlueButton instead of Zoom for example) if we would like to

    • We would like to ask Apereo to suggest a project manager for us to talk to about their experience of being under Apereo fiscal sponsorship? – Heather will draft reference questions and reach out to the newest project, and to a project that is transitioning to the Apache Foundation.

  • Application

  • Questions about timing:

    • After we submit an application, there is a process that Apereo goes through to accept us as a project. Should we submit the application and then get a vote from Partners, or get the vote first?

    • We could have Partners vote on moving forward with the Apereo application (ASAP, maybe right after the next Partner call) and then again when we have been accepted as a project and have bylaws changes to incorporate. Heather started a draft of what the bylaws changes might look like to switch from OASIS to Apereo, but it is possible those would change again as we work through the process with Apereo.

    • Suggest a Partners vote before kicking off the process

      • then work in parallel with Apereo to work on application

      • then vote to go ahead

    • We want to accelerate this process so we would like to go into the Partner’s meeting on February 12th with some of these questions resolved
      
      

• Board special election

  • Heather will set up a special election call for candidates next week, and will share a list of Partners and potential Board members for outreach.
    
    
    

• 2026 overview

  • 2026 Samvera Community Initiatives
    
    

• Next steps for a spring CNI proposal/advocating for them to host an OSS discussion series

  • Kirsten will bring back information from the fall CNI meeting
    
    

• 2026 events planning next steps

  • Midwest Regional Meeting/Partner meeting - potential dates

  • Virtual Connect - poll for best timing
    
    

• Board Vice Chair and Treasurer

  • We’ll have a choice to keep the treasurer role or no with Apereo; still need a Vice Chair

    • Juliet Hardesty is considering the Vice Chair role
      
      

• Other updates

  • Will share an announcement of Rob’s new role to the community, and via blog post, next week
    
    

• Agenda items for next month’s call: Next steps for Partnership Review Working Group; recap of IOI Hyku conversations so far
  
  

• Date of next Board meeting: February 19th