Samvera Community Wiki
2026-08-18 Documentation Interest Group Meeting Notes
🔗 Links
Participants
@Sarah Proctor - co-facilitator
@Morgan McKeehan - co-facilitator
@Heather Greer Klein
@Nic Don Stanton-Roark
@Rebekah Kati
Goals
IG check-in. Any questions from DocIG participants? Any issues folks want to discuss, and/or that need coordination/feedback with other groups?
Agenda items
Discuss confluence page: New Features and Needs - Proposed, In-Progress, Released.
Following up from a July 21 DocIG discussion. @Nick Steinwachs and/or @Nic Don Stanton-Roark will walk our group through the page to orient us to the different page sections, how users may use it to find info on development of features/particular topics of interest for their repository program, and how to submit feedback and/or responses to topics in the page.
Seeking feedback: How user friendly is this page? How can it be improved - is it clear how to navigate and use the page?
noting that there is inherent vendor vs institutional maintainer tension (innovate vs slow/dependable) - this page seeks to help with that, as a place for community to see features development, and share if features should be contributed back to Hyrax, when and why?
Another potential benefit: doc could allow us to align community needs with related vendor work?
New Features page - questions:
[Feel free to add other questions/points to discuss]
Purpose of this page is: a place for people to collaborate on design and show process.
Is this something that Hyrax could use?
Overall - Who is audience for the page, and who are the intended active users/contributors to the page
How is the page meant to be used - is it intended for users to add ideas/requests
if so - what kinds of contributions can users make to this page? How should folks add ideas here?
Potential suggestions:
add guidance for the users - how they can contribute to this page, how/where should they add suggestions
What is the overall workflow for points on this page - where is this document in the overall timeline/sequence of steps for development documentation?
Are ideas ever removed from this page, when they are completed? ie, Do things move from here into the Roadmap?
todo list at bottom of page - next steps = add in the features from 2024 regional mtgs sheet. Are there other locations (ie similar sources of lists of requests from users) that feed into this page?
Note that this doc requires active maintenance - what schedule for that/how to advise users.
We expect the New Features page discussion will take the full meeting time, but if not we will continue with: Categorizing/prepping tickets in Documentation Tasks Board
Discussion Notes
Run through of New Features and Needs - Proposed, In-Progress, Released by Nic Don
This page is a community space for community updates for Hyku
Heather is going to change the owner from Nick S to Nic Don for clarity as to the purpose of this document
Previously, this document was only proposals and used as a pre-road map area to get consensus from the community on definitions and features
Users can add their support, outline their individual needs, explain why it is important
Once a proposal gets traction and funding a page would be linked that contains the full description of the work that needs to be done; the pitch
As work moved into active development and then completed work, additional sections were added to the document
Sections are: Released Features, In-Progress Features, Proposed Work
Functionality of the page has gone from just proposals to chronologically tracking work
Nested pages are typically are created by Nick S, then pitched to the community
But this doesn’t have to be the case
Anyone can add proposed items, add another page that depicts the details, and do the work (either through Notch8 or with an in-house developer)
Group discussion notes:
Heather: How we organize our documentation is always up for rework, redesign, discussion.
Christine: How does this page relate to the documentation group, since this is documentation about future work as opposed to existing work (which tends to be what we typically focus on)?
While we do tend to focus on end-stage documentation there is no restriction on what kinds of documentation we do, any gaps in documentation can be identified by this group
This document spans all phases of work; it can be used for release notes and can be used as the end-stage documentation
How does Hyrax work through this same process?
Hyrax and Hyku are moving closer together in feature parity but having separate documents with similar purposes could create conflict in the definition of a feature
This document could potentially move from Hyku into Samvera level documentation
Hyrax has a gap in individual institutions implementations that aren’t documented and when other’s want that feature it is unclear how that implementation works; it could be helpful to find some examples of this and show how documentation can be added
Discussion on this topic will continue next month