Samvera Partner Call - October 13th, 2017

Facilitator: Nabeela Jaffer
Notetaker:  Mike Korcynski

Event Recording:

Agenda:

Update/Demo from Collections Sprint: Lynette Rayle  (15 mins)

Intro

• Working group started in January 2017, gathering requirements for what collections extensions would mean to Hyrax.  Awareness grew that use cases were quite varied.  Settled on looking at how we could create configurable collections to meet a wide range of use cases.
• 2nd Working group looked at collections UI/UX issues.  
• Implementation started in august after 2nd group wrapped and is continuing today.
• Primary functional area not completed is nesting collections, most other remaining things are QA issues.
• Will likely become part of Hyrax in a 2.x release.

Demo Notes:

• Added concept of collection types to Hyrax
• Must be an admin to administrate collection types
• User collections exist to provide a migration path for your current collections. You don't lose any functionality you have with your current collections, you can just go with user collections.
• Exhibits are staff curated collections of works
• Controlled collections are managed by staff but not intended for public display, organizational unit collections
• Admin Sets will eventually be just another type of collection
• Collection Features:
  • you can now say this collection allows nesting, is discoverable, allows sharing edit/read access
  • multiple membership works can belong to any number of collections of that type
  • you can add participants: managers, creators. spreads responsibility to the people who make the most sense
• Recommended that people use group membership over individual user membership because assignment of participants is done at collection creation time.  So makes maintenance way simpler to always use groups.
• Collections screen -- added what type of collection it is, visibility, works count. adds ability to nest collection. added filtering by visibility or collection type.
• Editing a collection – adding branding for banners for landing page, and logos, set discovery, change parenting of collection, went over how the roles interact with the collection
• Landing pages not fully operational yet, but showed what the concept will look like.

Hyrax/Valkyrie update : Michael Joseph Giarlo  (10 mins)

Hyrax

• 5 betas for the 2.0 release, first RC now available.
• Drafting an announcement that will go out shortly.
• Focus between RC and FINAL is fixing browse everything functionality
• Team welcome help with:
  • test the upgrade path. help figure out how good the release notes are.
  • creating documentation, testing bug fixes, accessibility testing.
  • repository managers guide to hyrax.
  • nurax.curationexperts.com <-- create your own account and kick the tires, report bugs.

Valkyrie:

• set up 4 one week sprints, this is the first week, some off weeks mixed in for Blacklight conference and Samvera Connect.
• U. of London, Indiana, Stanford, Northwestern, Princeton, Oregon State participating so far
• Early takeaways: Learning a lot, things are looking pretty good. More to say at Connect about when this will wrap up and what it means for Hyrax.

Questions:

• what is valkyrie?
  • started as experiment for persisting and querying from different backends
  • swap in and out backends, to give you more flexibility
  • allows you to remove active-fedora from the dependency chain
• Will it allow crosspopulation?
  • It will have composite adapters where when u write it goes to multiple backends that are configured.  Working towards answering the question: what would it take to write synchronously to one back-end and async to another?
• Will it require data migration if you're going to keep using Fedora as your back-end?
  • Still trying to pin this down. Data doesn't currently match the pcdm structure exactly. it may look exactly the same, it may not. Won't be in a release before next summer, so time to work this out.

Governance Model discussion (30 mins) (Evviva Weinraub + Mike Giarlo)

Survey Results:

• 14 comments submitted from entire community
• lower than expected response rate (but makes sense when we consider how people are or are not engaging)
• Seemed to be confusion about what people were asked to do.
  • Asked the same questions about every model but people didn't respond that way, organization and directions issues with survey
• Trey and Mike wrote up report of results
• What became clear is the comments indicated a preference for the foundation model in some configuration

Outcomes

• An hour scheduled at samvera connect to talk about that model more as a community
• Felt it was important to have non-community member facilitate, Northwestern will provide facilitator from Library.
• After the community discussion at Connect, Then we will spend the next day on what this might look like for the community at the in person partner meeting at Connect.
• Rather than focusing on the models exercise further, may be diminishing returns on that. Will now focus now on a small set of questions still being developed, to prompt more conversation.  May include things like:
  

  • what would it mean for samvera to become a duraspace project?

  • what would it mean for hyrax to become a duraspace project?

Questions

• Will there be subsequent document released before connect summarizing the survey results? or not enough there?
  • We could clean it up but nothing tremendously insightful, in the spirit of clear communication we'll get it out though.

• What would the foundation own? just hyrax and hyku? or beyond that?
  • The foundation idea grew out of the question: what if we modelled the samvera community similar to the islandora community? It would add a foundation but wouldn't remove the idea of partners so it would be a bridge serving as an evolution of the current model.
• Primary benefit would be a more permanent structure for dedicated resources? 
  • Right, but we have to have conversations to flush out to make sure we're all on the same page. but this Model that gives us the most flexibility to do that.
• Can we make sure we send materials on this to individual attendees not just the elists for people who may be attending SamveraConnect but not following the lists?
  • Yes

Misc:

• We're simultaneously hearing we need to resource work and we're hearing concern about funding streams causing pay-to-play situations fear that you only get a say in the road map if you pitch in.
• What does offering hosted services through duraspace mean for our community? 
• How are we structuring ourselves in a way that are still listening to voices of places who may not have a lot of resources to contribute.
• We've gone far together, the adhocracy has had its flaws, lets figure out how to make the next 10 years even better.

Action Items:

• Send out some information before connect to the elists and connect participants.
• Finalize agenda for this topic for partner meeting.

ATTENDEES

Nabeela Jaffer (University of Michigan)

Mike Korcynski (Tufts)

Margaret Mellinger (Oregon State University) 

Steve Van Tuyl (oregon state university)

Rick Johnson (University of Notre Dame)

Carolyn Caizzi (northwestern)

evviva (northwestern)

Michael Joseph Giarlo (stanford)

newmanld (Cincinnati)

arouner (Washington University in St. Louis)

Franny Gaede (University of Oregon)

Chris Awre (University of Hull)

Alicia Morris (Tufts)

Karen Cariani (WGBH)

Lynette Rayle (Cornell)