What does Open Source Collaboration look like?

To kick off the Sustaining Hyku IMLS grant, one of the first steps was to consider previous practices in open-source collaboration, both within and outside of the Samvera Community. Two useful community-minded resources immediately surfaced:

• The Community Cultivation Field Guide and Resource Library from Educopia are other resources to help collaborative groups navigate the community lifecycle, including activities for articulating purpose and determining priorities.
• It Takes a Village (ITAV) from Lyrasis, with its Guidebook, Toolkit, and Community, aims to help open-source software (OSS) programs achieve long-term sustainability, and provides practical tools to plan and implement sustainable practices. The Samvera Community itself piloted the ITAV Toolkit in 2022, and focused on the facets of Resources and Technology. The Samvera Community Case Study can be found here.

One Samvera Community member recommended two books on these topics:

• The Art of Community by Jono Bacon
• Producing Open Source Software by Karl Fogel

Several organizations were identified that embody principles of collaboration and community (especially around open source), such as:

• Center for Scientific Collaboration and Community Engagement
• Invest in Open Architecture
• Future of Libraries is Open (FOLIO)
• Project Reshare
• Our own Samvera Community
• … and many more!

The Samvera Community has developed open-source collaboration that works by clearly defining groups and roles to direct and implement the development of the Samvera platforms. See more about Samvera community leadership.

• Samvera Partners and the Samvera Board offer a firm foundation for governance. 
• Samvera’s Community Manager, Heather Greer Klein, works closely with groups and offers guidance and holistic attention to the Samvera ecosystem.  
• The Roadmaps Alignment Group meets regularly and works to identify conflicts and areas of alignment across Samvera platforms.  
• Interest Groups, and Working Groups: come together to discuss and work on matters of particular importance to the Samvera Community at any given time.
• Samvera’s Avalon Media System hosts a user roundtable to allow the community of users, testers, and adopters to share resources, ideas, and efforts toward the support, development, and future of Avalon Media System. 
• Samvera’s Hyrax leadership roles are defined at .25 FTE each (see Hyrax Product Owner and Hyrax Technical Lead). 

The Sustaining Hyku grant seeks to better establish Hyku within the overarching Samvera structure by defining roles similar to those at work with closely-related Hyrax.