Hyrax Permissions Working Group Close-Out Report

On 2020-03-30, the members of the Hyrax Permissions Working Group met and decided to wrap-up the working group. The drivers for closing the working group are:

For Notch8's have the necessary information they need to proceed in working on the Hyku for consortia work
Avalon needs enhancements and modifications to the underlying Hyrax permissions, but the timeline for Avalon building on Hyrax has shifted.
In light of the ongoing, and seemingly sputtering, Valkyrie integration work, we are looking to conserve effort, and recommend focusing on Valkyrie. In part because the design of permissions could be greatly altered with a shift in our data persistence paradigm. Also, the permission work is possible another large conceptual change.

Expected Deliverables

The working group deliverables will be:

A document outlining the proposed technical strategy to implement functional requirements. This document will have enough information to guide implementers of permissions-related features in their future work.
A list of the functional requirements addressed by the proposed technical strategy
With as much detail as deemed sufficient, an explanation of why other requirements are not being addressed.
A rough design of the page(s) where permissions and roles are configured.

Delivered Artifacts

The working group's wiki page contains an over-view, links each meeting minute, and a link to this report. The group has refined and reviewed the Permission Matrix, an artifact brought forward from the Samvera Permissioning Analysis and Design Working Group. We have a Hyrax Roles & Permissions Proposal that defines a possible extension of the Sipity workflow system to encompass broader permissions.

The Permission Matrix document collates the use cases we've gathered from the community. It is foundational in conversations regarding permissions. The Hyrax Roles & Permissions Proposal is a document that we have been discussing. We consider this document "Under Discussion" and not yet agreed upon by the working group. The group was not able to complete Deliverable 2, 3 nor 4.

One observation of this working group is that solution to address the Permission Matrix use cases requires quite a bit of concentration and likely high degree of bandwidth to collaborate on providing further design documents and approaches at incorporating the change.

The group is looking at the approach of Valkyrie, with its refactor in place and adding code to production early (even though that code may not be leveraged). We believe this is the correct approach for something as pervasive as our permissions use cases.

Next Steps

Maria Whitaker has offered to open a Permissions interest group. The goal of the IG is to sustain interest and conversations regarding the community desired enhancements and extensibility of permissions in Hyrax.

It is the chair's recommendation, that development of permissions enhancements should be deferred until Valkyrie integration is complete.

In addition, future permission work will likely require similar contributions and effort to that of the Collections Extension Development Sprints.