2025-09-26 Community Council Meeting Minutes at WOLFcon

Membership

Points of discussion

• Value for membership

• Membership relative to line item contributions

• Membership letter

• Membership campaign

Membership and Value Proposition

• The group discussed how to provide more compelling value for membership beyond just logo placement on the website

• Current membership funding is essential for supporting AWS resources, QA environments, and testing infrastructure

• Several approaches to increasing membership were considered:

  • Creating a more robust set of membership benefits

  • Developing a clearer distinction between membership and line-item contributions

  • Potentially restricting certain resources or services to members only

Potential Member Benefits Discussed:

• Access to QA environments and tested releases: Non-members could receive releases later

• Access to reference environments: For current and upcoming releases

• Discounted rates for WOLFcon attendance: Rather than offering one or more registrations, offer a tiered percentage discount on all registrations from a member organization.

• Documentation access: Similar to ArchivesSpace's model

• Slack access: Requiring membership for an institution's domain to access the FOLIO Slack instance.

• Institution recognition: Having member institution names scrolling on the FOLIO homepage or login screen as recognition.

• Reserved governance seats: Designated seats on councils for different types of institutions (small libraries, consortia, regional representation)

• Development priority influence: Greater say in determining development priorities (though there were concerns about weighting votes based on contribution level)

• Technical expertise access: One-on-one access to community experts for specific technical questions

• Specialized troubleshooting support: Access to guidance for diagnosing and resolving system issues

• API and technical training: Specialized training on using APIs and advanced technical features

• Reporting tools expertise: Access to community knowledge about effective use of reporting tools

• Training materials and resources: See discussion below

• Community letter and outreach benefits: Inclusion in community communications and promotions

Line-Item Contributions vs. Membership

• Line-item contributions on hosting renewal invoices were suggested as a "no barrier to entry" approach. The concept allows institutions to add a small amount to what they already pay their hosting provider.

• This differs from formal membership, which would include defined benefits and governance participation

• Showing tangible results from financial support is crucial for institutions

Membership Tiers and Outreach

• The current tiering model primarily differentiates by logo size and WOLFcon attendance benefits

• Concerns were raised about the membership model for consortia (whether a consortium of multiple libraries should pay the same as an individual institution)

• Shawn has compiled a list of approximately 83 institutions and consortia that are FOLIO adopters but not members. The group discussed creating a letter campaign targeting these institutions. @Shawn Nicholson volunteered to lead the effort to survey FOLIO potential members.

Training

Can the FOLIO community organize and deliver training?

• The group explored creating formal training materials as a potential member benefit

• Unlike other open source communities, FOLIO does not currently "own" its training

• Training is typically a component of RFP responses, so vendors are unlikely to cede control to the community for such an important part of a response.

• Suggestions included:

  • Video libraries of training sessions and demos

  • Task-level training on specific modules

  • Certificate programs for FOLIO expertise

  • Access to community experts for technical questions

  • Troubleshooting and system management training

Communications

Can we do better than Slack for giving people a summary of / window into what’s happening in WOLFcon?

This topic was deferred to another meeting.

Latin American adoption

Can we better organize for outreach to and participation from Latin American libraries?

This topic was deferred to another meeting.

Meetings, especially with developers

Can we reinfuse WOLFcon (et al.) with more developers / a technical track?

This topic was deferred to another meeting. It was also discussed briefly in the WOLFcon Technical Council meeting.

Technical Council WG on 3rd party licenses

Nature of the License Conflict

• The Apache Software Foundation explicitly excludes LGPL from compatible licenses. There's a fundamental conflict between Apache 2.0 license (used by FOLIO) and LGPL dependencies.

• We discussed how the license conflict varies based on how libraries are incorporated:

  • Dynamic linking vs. static linking affects compliance requirements.

  • Different programming languages handle dependencies differently. Java-based dependencies might have different compliance requirements than Go dependencies, for instance.

Technical Details and Current Usage

• Three LGPL-licensed dependencies are currently used in the FOLIO codebase despite the license compatibility concerns: CQL-Java (from Index Data), MARC4J, and Hibernate (used in many Spring Boot modules). These existing dependencies have been permitted in the current module evaluation process; however, the Technical Council has now directed that no additional LGPL dependencies should be approved until the working group process is complete.

• Go language modules are particularly problematic because they compile dependencies directly into executables, creating "combined works" under license terms.

• Would JavaScript bundling be considered a similar "combined work" situation?

• The evaluation has expanded to include not just direct dependencies but dependencies of dependencies.

Risk Assessment and Potential Solutions

• The greatest legal risk would be to organizations with "deeper pockets" like EBSCO and Index Data.

• Several approaches were considered:

  • Replacing LGPL components with compatible alternatives (deemed potentially very difficult).

  • Freezing the current exceptions at existing versions (which could create security concerns).

  • Exploring whether certain usage patterns might be compliant despite the license conflict.

  • Finding ways to dynamically link libraries at runtime rather than bundling them..

The Community Council endorses a recommendation to Technical Council not to add new LGPL dependencies. CC will contact OLF to obtain legal counsel on this topic (see Questions Regarding LGPL 2.1 document).

CC recommends that the Foundation review this issue with member projects and coordinate the need for legal representation.