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Today I attended the annual @samverarepo community "Connect" conference. I thought it timely share some thoughts I& #39;ve been having about the Samvera community and my/our place therein. Here& #39;s the thread. (1/15)
First up, I& #39;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& #39;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& #39;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& #39;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& #39;ve pushed back if someone claimed that @samverarepo was merely a set of Ruby/Rails projects or a Fedora-adjacent community, I can& #39;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& #39;s tight coupling to Fedora. (7/15)
Since that time, some really inspiring work has happened to maintain the software we& #39;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& #39;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& #39;s digital collections accessible now & into the future. (11/15)
I still believe in this vision for our community. It& #39;s just that... there& #39;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& #39;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& #39;t have a good answer anymore. But if I trust any group of people to figure it out... it& #39;s the @samverarepo community. 
https://abs.twimg.com/emoji/v2/... draggable="false" alt="😀" title="Grinsendes Gesicht" aria-label="Emoji: Grinsendes Gesicht"> </thread> (15/15)
