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Today I attended the annual @samverarepo community "Connect" conference. I thought it timely share some thoughts I've been having about the Samvera community and my/our place therein. Here's the thread. (1/15)
First up, I'll disclaim that this is no original thought. I am certain the @samverarepo Partners and Steering group have kicked this around many times in different forms, and I'm not as active in this community as I once was. (2/15)
The @samverarepo community has been clear in its messaging for years that we are a *community* first and foremost. What this means: what binds us is our mission and our collaborative approach to problem-solving, not our technology choices, not our solution stacks. (3/15)
I've always thought this a wise choice. We endeavor to "stay together" despite radical technology shifts, and we want to be open to innovation and changes in direction. (4/15)
Now I want to make an observation that maybe fellow @samverarepo folk share, or maybe they don't share, and that is this: despite the community-first messaging, for the first decade of its existence (2009-2018-ish?), the community largely used the same tooling. (5/15)
While I might've pushed back if someone claimed that @samverarepo was merely a set of Ruby/Rails projects or a Fedora-adjacent community, I can't deny that we put a *lot* of time and effort towards building and designing software we could all use at that time. (6/15)
Furthermore, we really struggled with the move from Fedora 3->4. We got through it somewhat unscathed because of our community orientation and our common bonds, as designed, but the community is still grappling with some of the shared software's tight coupling to Fedora. (7/15)
Since that time, some really inspiring work has happened to maintain the software we've written and to come up with more flexible ways to integrate with platforms such as Fedora & Postgres (Valkyrie), and yet, there remain very few production implementations based on it. (8/15)
We have also started to see evidence of some @samverarepo Partners drifting away from the community, some disengaging altogether, and others who no longer use any of the shared tooling. (9/15)
I'd count my own institution among these Partners. While we remain committed to @samverarepo, and engaged in the Partnership, Steering, & working groups, we no longer have concrete plans to use any of the community software (even while we happily stick w/ Ruby & Rails). (10/15)
The @samverarepo vision: [we are] a vibrant and welcoming community of information and technology professionals who share challenges, build expertise, & create sustainable, best-in-class solutions, making the world's digital collections accessible now & into the future. (11/15)
I still believe in this vision for our community. It's just that... there's arguably nothing in the vision statement that distinguishes it from the broader Open Repositories community or from the Islandora Foundation vision or the DSpace vision. (12/15)
Short aside: the Islandora Foundation and DSpace vision statements go farther down the road of mentioning their commitment to shared open-source code than the @samverarepo one does, in fact. Feature? Bug? I don't know. (13/15)
Reflecting on the state of @samverarepo, the (growing?) technical divergence, and the open-ended vision statement, I am left wondering what the identity of @samverarepo is anymore, and what distinguishes it from other communities (if not the technology). (14/15)
I don't have a good answer anymore. But if I trust any group of people to figure it out... it's the @samverarepo community. 
</thread> (15/15)
</thread> (15/15)
