Samvera Fundraising Call for 2018

Samverans, 

We are launching a fundraising campaign for 2018; our goal is to raise $150,000 for the year. This funding will flesh out the vision defined in the recent, unanimously approved, Samvera governance proposal: to hire staffing for centralized product and technical management roles.  

The last year has seen remarkable progress for the community, including...

• the release of Hyrax as the next generation of repository application, combining the best of Sufia and CurationConcerns, along with continued investment in both Fedora 4 and Valkyrie as a new strategy for persistence
• 15 meetings / trainings / Partner events in North America and Europe, including nearly 200 attendees at SamveraConnect in Evanston, IL in November 2017
• four new Partners, and more interest than ever in consulting and commercial services
• new working & interest groups in governance, code maintenance, and roadmapping

These milestones signify Samvera's continued success as a thriving, grassroots, community-driven effort. The contributions and sweat equity of willing Partners and other project participants have been the hallmarks of the Samvera Way; our ability to collaborate on shared goals and code will continue to be our main engine for progress.

But to evolve to the next level, and to produce a reliable, managed, predictable repository platform, we now need to pool resources to help organize and orchestrate our collective work. We are seeking to double last year's fund-raising and bring in $150,000 in 2018. This money will fund Samvera staff, accountable to the community as a whole, to manage the roadmapping, development and release of new Samvera code. This will allow us to better leverage the investments we are already making in the project, while also producing a more predictable and managed development process we can rely on.    

If 30 institutions give $5,000 each, we can meet our target for the year. 

Thank you for considering this contribution, and helping to take Samvera to the next level.