Samvera Community Wiki
2026-07-16 Board Meeting Agenda & Minutes
Attendees
@Aaron Collier
@Juliet Hardesty
@Michael B. Klein
@Annamarie Klose
@Kirsten Leonard
@Kate Lynch
@Jessica McMillen
@Christine Peterson
@Paul Walk
Ex-officio:
@Heather Greer Klein
Agenda
Changes to the agenda?
Question about Hyrax mid and long-term strategy
Questions about when there will be parity between Postgres and F6 features for Hyrax. Confirmed our commitment to complete feature parity for both options.
From Rob, we’re almost there. About to start performance testing F6 in Nurax (community testathon, Julie is getting this ready). Next Hyrax release will be compound metadata and Bulkrax improvements. Then, the following Hyrax release will bring full feature parity between Postgres and F6, with any needed work uncovered in the performance testing.
We need more Hyrax institutions off of F4 so we can better test that migration path. Rob has made this a priority and will offer migration planning support to Samvera Partners.
IU should not carry Postgres-Fedora dual-track development alone; institutions wanting this configuration need to contribute collaboratively, as there is a lot of interest in this approach. We’ll need to engage developers in a community effort.
Use Julie's upcoming F6.nurax performance testing announcement (Phase 2, targeting 5,000+ works collection) as the primary vehicle to re-engage Hyrax institutions who are using Fedora, rather than creating a separate initiative immediately.
Heather will coordinate with Nick and Rob to frame next month's Hyrax Interest Group meeting specifically around mid/long-term strategy, using it as a community outreach touchpoint.
Analysis of current platform installations
Suggestion from last month: Could there be an analysis of what the gap is between Hyku now and what most Hyrax repositories have customized for? Interesting in terms of strategy, and worth talking to Hyrax users for a feature survey to see how far apart they are. What are the features that Hyku has, and have you done this in your Hyrax? Can this be part of the upgrades plan work Rob is doing?
Proposed approach: Survey Hyku’s recent feature releases and ask Hyrax institutions whether they independently developed equivalent functionality; sharpens the gap analysis.
Action for Heather to get more information on the samvera homepage re:Hyrax and Hyku comparison language.
Generative AI tagging guidelines review and next steps
Draft guideline - revised down to the tagging requirement
add that we don't accept agentic AI PR submissions. These could come from outside our community via agentic automations for updating underlying software, so good to have a human in the loop policy at the PR stage. A contributor is a human who can understand, discuss, and describe the code they are submitting.
Want to make sure dependabot is still allowed - say explicitly this is allowed. otherwise PRs need to come from humans.
The policy will be scoped to code contributions only; a human must be the submitting author of any pull request; Dependabot is explicitly carved out as an accepted automated tool.
Next steps for this guideline: share in Slack, take to next tech call, get this in the contributions markdown readme, and call it out on the main readme for each project.
Next steps for a Board-designated working group for managing risk and capacity. Heather happy to help with admin, but it needs a developer facilitator. The current AI interest group doesn’t have capacity for this kind of scoped governance work.
example file (e.g., Princeton's approach); still needs to be created
Latest Apereo transition work
Proposal from Heather for our Apereo microconference topic: Notch8 and Westminster discuss and share the practice research repository they are creating with Hyku. Appealing to a technical audience and a wider higher ed/research audience, and would show the state of the art for Hyku.
For a future microconference idea: could IU talk about how they departmentally/culturally prioritize their OSS community participation?
Other updates - attorney for OASIS signed transfer doc yesterday. Heather’s employment transfer next.
Outstanding invoices will still go to OASIS and new invoices will come from Apereo.
Apereo transition requires stripping OASIS language from bylaws, requires a partner vote. Heather will simplify the partner agreement significantly: remove legacy Hydra-era tiered application language, clarify value proposition, and streamline cost structure.
Consortial membership tier: Exploring a separate model for consortia that provides more predictable revenue; currently consortia contributions are counted outside annual budget planning.
Shared staffing cost modeling work (carried over from last month)
Rough draft strawperson Samvera support program
Hyku product owner role is particularly useful to the consortial groups and they could come together to ensure that contract can extend past October. We need annual funding to support this same arrangement for Hyrax Product Owner. Nick Homenda’s volunteer term in the role ends Dec 31.
Samvera supporter level could be an option for consortia hosted users as well. Every consortia or hosting provider is a little different, so it is hard to find what service add-on would appeal across all of them.
Potentially could offer Partners dedicated consultation hours with product owner or tech lead on flexible metadata, collection setup, configuration. Connects the value of financial contribution to supporting these roles. Would charging for this and offering a discount for contributors be helpful?
Avoid over-specifying in governance documents since support structures available and contracts can change year to year; make the ROI argument without locking in specifics.
As Knapsack matures as the future interface for Hyku, it could become a structured meeting point for user support and consultation, potentially codifying the support model.
Volunteers for Julie Allinson Award selection committee with Chris Awre?
Jessica and Julie
Other updates:
AWS costs for nurax testing servers have been going up. Some of this is from prep for performance testing. Rob put the nurax servers behind Cloudflare and believes this will help.
Paul proposed Linode/Akamai as a cheaper Kubernetes-based alternative; running comparable workloads (including IRD) for ~$120/month; offered to review a cost breakdown. Heather will share AWS cost breakdown with Paul for an estimate.
Heather nominated for OR Steering Committee for Sep 2026-Aug 2029. Heather will accept the nomination for the 3-year term, with guardrails on time commitment; will not join subcommittees.
British Library ETHOS is live, Heather is looking for a press release to share widely https://ethos.bl.uk/
Agenda items for next month’s call: Expanding international awareness
Date of next Board meeting: Aug 20, 2026