2026-05-14 Partner Call

Facilitator: @Heather Greer Klein

Note Taker:

Attendees

• @Rob Kaufman

• @Paul Walk

• @Jon Dunn

• @Eleni Castro

• @Annamarie Klose

• @Chris Awre

• @Kirsten Leonard

• @Nicholas Mark Homenda

• @Nick Steinwachs

Agenda & Notes

• Additions to the agenda?

  • Idea from Rob about a potential migration support service from the Tech Coordinator. Potentially this could be a Partner benefit.

    • This is about help with moving from one version of Hyrax/Hyku to a more recent version

    • How to crack the upgrade problem is something Heather and Rob have been discussing. We need to address the active_fedora issues as fewer and fwer people will have expertise to keep it going. Rob had the idea that we could offer the tech coordinaotr reviewing apps and providing upgrade plans, steps to take to upgrade your app. Core philosophy for this is it creates: hyrax apps we would not otherwise get to see because they are afraid to show it, potential to drive partnership; opportunity to see where everyone is, what features are hiding in their Hyrax; by crating a step by step could be quoted by outside vendors and the internal team. Will also know how much effort it actually is, now with better tooling. Not fun work for devs and they estimate it conservatively, just human nature.

    • Another benefit - could reduce the technical debt in the community.

    • Would help send the message that Partnership removes some local burden.

    • Would also help with comparing true cost of upgrade vs moving to a system from scratch (always longer than estimated) or going to a proprietary vendor.

    • Overall good support and interest/feedback. Rob will write this up to share.
      
      

• Samvera Virtual Connect reflections

  • Appreciated the technical presentations to share with devs

    • Notably:

      • the migration presentation - very useful resource for sharing with local developers/tech support staff

      • the “Whack a mole” presentation

  • Appreciated the community-decision-making presentation

    • This could be applied to other communities

  • Appreciated the discussion about the possible relationships between Fedora and Postgres in the backend

    • Do we want to continue to support both? In what relationship?

  • Appreciated the range of presenters

    • Gained some new Slack participants as a result

  • May plan another day meeting in December
    
    

• Samvera Europe meeting recap/updates

  • ORCID certified repository system criteria - gauging interest from the community

  • Updates from Oxford, Hull, CoSector, Antleaf

  • Event was piggy-backed on CoSector Technical conference. Maybe didn’t work quite so well as last year which was an additional day after the IIIF conference

  • Useful discussion about Knapsack

  • Also useful to have a representative from the Orcid organisation

    • Discussion about possibility of becoming “certified” service provider for Orcid

    • We may need to review the current Orcid support in our software

• Great overview of what is happening at Oxford with their ORA workflows

• Lesson learned about having a meeting within another conference, it was better when we had it the next day

• Big discussion about metrics:

  • Problem with bots breaking usage stats

  • Lots of people want to ditch GA

  • Rob: Hyrax has support for internal metrics
    
    

• Discussion: Local usage and/or policies around coding assistants and their interactions with GitHub repositories. What are you doing locally? What are the experiments, or concerns? What policies should we have in place for our repos?

  • Devs are using AI assisted coding tools in many ways, up to full blown agentic orchestration. A line between using tools, and contributing to a shared code base, and when something like Claude is listed as a contributor in GitHub. Is this an important distinction? Lots of genuine concerns about how this can impact OSS. We should consider the difference between a person contributing code vs a tool directly contributing code.

  • GitHub may have copilot adding itself as a contributor? There may have been discussion of this on the C4L listserv.

  • GitLab has recently gone all in on AI and would not be an alternative to GitHub.

  • Is there a need for a working group, or a sub-conversation for the AI Working Group? Outcomes-based, and work towards a practice.

  • Could come down to accountability and responsibility. A tool is not accountable and responsible to the code submitted to a repo. A person is.
    
    

• Hyku decision-making discussion from Connect: opportunity for additional feedback

  • An opportunity for Partners to contribute to feedback Brainstorm & Discussion Padlet
    
    

• The latest on Improving the Bulk Import Experience for Hyrax and Hyku: Community-Funded Bulkrax Sprints

•  

• Other Updates: 

  1. Notetaker for June?

  2. https://forms.gle/RgdTWodrV8QzhRwe6

  3. Please consider a demo or discussion at a 2026 Partner call

  4. Anything for the Samvera Board? (Standing item) 
     
     

Date of next call: June 11th (overlaps with Open Repositories Closing Keynote) - reviewing numbers for shared staffing. What does our budget need to be to support shared staffing roles short-term and long-term?

Notetaker: