Samvera Code Submission Guidelines Working Group

The kick-off call will be Friday, September 11th at 10 AM PT / 1 PM ET / 17:00 UTC. If you can’t join the call but would still like to participate in the group, or if you can’t access the wiki to add your name to the member list, just email heather@samvera.org.

Goals

Our community and the people within the community remain central.
Code contributions are from community members, who make their own choices about what tools and technologies they use to assist them with their work. As a community, we use guidelines to ensures those code contributions continue to be manageable for reviewers and to be high quality.
Established automated processes (such as dependabot) and code contribution requirements (including an upcoming signed CLA and iCLA initiative) are encompassed in guidelines.

Scope & Objectives

This Working Group will recommend guidelines to help submitters to Samvera’s GitHub organization understand community expectations regarding authorship and responsibility for their submissions. The expectations the Samvera Board and Partners have identified are:

A requirement that AI tool use is acknowledged per the draft guidelines for tagging AI-assisted or generated code, or other processes that may be recommended by the working group;
guidelines to ensure that all code contributions have a human author (ie nothing “agentic” or automated by a tool; nothing without a named, human, responsible author);
that the author has responsibility for their own contributions; the author understands what they are contributing and can discuss it if needed during code review; that the submitter has guidance about best practices for crafting submissions that reduce complexity for the reviewer;
the working group may also suggest additional guidelines or resources to provide to submitters related to these expectations.

This Working Group is chartered by the Samvera Board, and recommendations will be delivered to the Board and discussed in the Samvera Partners call.

Deliverables & Timeframe

The group will deliver a list of recommended guidelines and any other recommendations, including suggested implementation processes if applicable.

The goal for the group is to complete their work and close the group by the end of 2026.

Meeting Times & Communication Channels

Meetings will be held over Zoom. A private Slack channel will be created for group discussions.

Members

@Kirsten Leonard , facilitator (PALNI)
@Heather Greer Klein (Samvera Community)
@Eleni Castro (Amigos Library Services)
@Juliet Hardesty (Indiana University)
@Alexandra Dunn (UCSB)
@kibigo (UCSB)
@Dolsy Smith (GWU)
@Trey Pendragon (Princeton University)

Samvera Community Wiki