Samvera Community Wiki
2026-05-20 Outreach & Engagement agenda and notes
https://us06web.zoom.us/j/83216557729?pwd=j8bBReawbVVtZyAOwQEFvF8vRZ8hQr.1
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Participants
@Molly Reed
@Heather Greer Klein
@Chris Awre
@Nick Steinwachs
Michelle Hall and Jenn Cummings, Apereo
Your name here!
Agenda & Notes
Welcome to Michelle and Jenn and introductions
Everyone at Apareo is part-time
Many projects coming on, and also communities of interest
Recruiting another staff member for community development + outreach
Apereo communications and options for Samvera
How do you envision marketing and transition to Apareo? Not one entity, lots of parts… how do we communicate that?
Heather: we’ve seen a lot of the options of Apareo member communities / projects (e.g. Sakai?). We like the flexibility that Apareo has. We would like some “splash” in marketing outreach / press release to share our excitement at becoming part of Apareo.
Heather: How I envision talking about Samvera: we have components to the platform, but Hyku is the easiest one to grasp.
Jenn: Aligns with her vision… most aligns with Sakai. How do we talk about Samvera versus the projects? Many of the projects stand alone… Sometimes it may be meaningful to call out the projects separately.
Specifically, How should we represent Samvera on the Apareo website
Chris: How do we position community from a marketing standpoint? It’s part of the “product” or THING that is Samvera, which seems to align with Apareo’s focus on community.
Michelle: Take a look at dat-ecosystem - Samvera seems like a more structured version of them.
Jenn: we have quarterly community calls. (twice per quarter to account for timezone differences)
Latest: Incubation group is restarting - place for groups to use Apareo to bring their project to the next level.
Growing event presence – going to open-source events, and talk about higher-ed, and go to higher-ed events and talk about open-source. Been working well.
Michelle: Event this week?
Michelle: Interest Groups - educating in
Working with interest groups: students, EU, learning, Africa. Big digital sovereignty conversations.
Nick: Product management as glue that binds
Michelle: Sakai’s PMC group does this - Talk to Wilma Hodges
Jenn: Also, mindset situation - strong bias against organizing like a business in open-source communities.
Jenn: Take a look at the digital sovereignty coming out of Europe - lots of shifts going to be happening.
Michelle: Look into our commercial members - Unicon, EDF
Nick
Molly: Waving the Hyku flag depends on who you’re talking to - Samver’s fit from a marketing communication perspective is more narrow. There is a specific set of stakeholders that care about Samvera, and we use Hyku, but beyond that, interest would be limited.
Heather: We, as a community, often just assume our audience is Librarians. It is good to keep in mind that Apareo’s audience is NOT just Librarians - many different stakeholders who may not even really know what a repository is, or their importance.
Michelle: ELI5 - tell me what you do. That’s how we’ll figure out your marketing strategy within Apareo. It is important to keep in mind the Samvera projects as well.
Jenn: Benito - super technical. Asked him to talk about the elevator version of what’s going on technical. Think about doing this: elevator pitch of what’s going on with Samvera. Meet the audience where they are.
WHERE DO YOU FIT WITHIN WHERE A UNIVERSITY OPERATES??
Michelle: How have you talked about Samvera joining Apareo
Heather: A community becoming a part of larger community (Apareo). Specifically not a 'merger'.
Michelle: here’s a PR example: https://www.apereo.org/news/2025/apereo-foundation-welcomes-dat-ecosystem-community
Nick: that is what I’d expect
Michelle: What’s your social media presence, how is it working out?
Heather provides overview
Michelle: LI is primary, Mastodon has a healthy dev following. LI-specific newsletter has also been successful. Tagging researchers directly increases the following. Nothing paid
Michelle: What do you use for comms?
SLACK (paid)
Jenn - join the Apareo Slack
Michelle: civicrm - will add Samvera so we have a CRM.
Samvera Europe & Virtual Connect reflections
Open Repositories - June 8-12
Samvera
Samvera Blog Post - should highlight:
Samvera partner orgs attending / presenting
Notch8 presenter
Community members validating Notch8’s contributions via testimonials / stories
Hyku website: https://github.com/samvera/hyku-next
Added Hyku 7 release
Added an issue to see if we can configure Contentful to post to both blogs (Hyku and Samvera)
https://github.com/samvera/samvera.org/issues/173 - Heather will share with April
Notch8
Notch8 is a gold sponsor; can use this to talk about Bulkrax work - “Here’s how we work with and help lead open source communities.”
Notch8 will have a video and a few 1-pagers - virtual “vendor booth”… not sure how effective this will be.
Want to share more stories about the Samvera community!
Let’s talk about ePrints - what we need to communicate / build to win their market + customers
Plugins????
Hit up @Rory McNicholl for more info
PALNI / PALCI
@Nic Don Stanton-Roark presenting Hyku in repository showdown
Highlighting Features?
Goals
Partner retention & engagement
Customer / user retention & engagement
Product and Community Marketing and communications
Discussion around “Move away from Open Source”
lack of stakeholder awareness regarding the ability to stay in open source, while avoiding maintaining and hosting yourself
Increasing market share of AM Quartex
Checking on Actions from last meeting
Highlight Bulk Import story ASAP - Nick can own
Reach out to UTK + UPitt / PALS re: pre-CNI Messaging for social proof - Nick
Parking lot/coming up
Semantics / Terminology - how Hyku / Hyrax fulfills (or not) these purposes (deserves a page each) - Consider adding specifically to the Hyku subdomain.
Demo environment improvements - Notch8 team currently focused on getting Hyku7 patched up and out the door.
Demo environment investment =
Tenant portability (Styling, layouts, themes, colors, CSS, test data, metadata configs)
+
Quality assurance and Upgradeability
+
Growth