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2025-04-14 Community Council Meeting Minutes

2025-04-14 Community Council Meeting Minutes

 

Attendees

@Christopher Spalding , @Simeon Warner , @Shawn Nicholson , @Maike Osters , @Rachael Kotarski , @Edwin Pretz , @spampell , @Mike Gorrell ; @Boaz Nadav Manes , @Joseph Grobelny , @Kirstin Kemner-Heek ; @Johanna Radding

 

Guests: @Kristin Martin , @Jesse Koennecke @Peter Murray , @Maccabee Levine, @Vanessa French

Regrets:

Note Taker: @Kirstin Kemner-Heek / @Maike Osters

Discussion items

Item

Who

@Notes

Item

Who

@Notes

Note taker

@Simeon Warner

Note taker for April 28? @Shawn Nicholson

Updates / Checkins

@Simeon Warner

Proposed FY26 membership model/levels

@Kirstin Kemner-Heek @spampell @Simeon Warner @Kathleen Berry

Action from 2025-03-18/19 CC, PC & TC chairs and Officer In-Person Summit . Proposal:

  • Keep current membership levels the same (can’t decrease as we need $, don’t have plan/bandwidth to work out more, and we discussed in the summit that we want broader membership as the long term strategy)

  • Add a new “Friends of FOLIO” contribution option

    • $700 or larger contribution

    • Acknowledged with small logo on website in new category

    • Not formally a membership (a donation from the point of view of the governance model). No MOU, no voting rights, no free WOLFconf ticket

  • Prepare a new solicitation letter that offers the Friends of FOLIO option as well as membership levels. Highlight importance of community funding for QA efforts, test environments, move to Eureka, and broad participation as essential to sustainability.

    • Discussion

      • Good amount, consider end of FI (differs from institutions)

      • Question: Are there adjustments for the other membership levels? Answer : no

      • Do we want to incorporate this result in the letter prepared by Shawn / Joseph?

        • Yes and show it on the web side

      • Inst.- may want to pay a higher membership but need reasons to do so - e.g. benefits

      • Consider “new story” made up by membership group as well

      • Friends of FOLIO is fine because the year is already far advanced, then consider the work of the member subgroup as well in the nearer future → will hopefully published soon

      • Convince libraries to enhance the membership level! We should try!

      • Is there a risk that members paying more would reduce to $700 due to the new option?

        • They don’t have voting rights then.

        • Isn’t the $700 idea going to a different group of people?

        • Shift in responsibility wil be key in future

        • “Soft entry” with 700 and then do more while entering the community?

        • See the effects of contributions! We need to enlight this

      • From Shawn:

        • Here is the draft language Finally, we appreciate all the ways our community members contribute to FOLIO. If you’d like to explore end-of-fiscal-year financial support at $700, feel free to reach out to FOLIO Treasurer Kathleen Berry at treasurer@folio.org.

      • Result: 12 approved - proposal is passed!

      • ACTION - Simeon to add a note about this at the bottom on for https://folio-org.atlassian.net/wiki/x/Y5p page - DONE

FOLIO Vision Statement

@spampell @Joseph Grobelny @Shawn Nicholson @Jesse Koennecke

  • Action from 2025-03-18/19 CC, PC & TC chairs and Officer In-Person Summit: Group for vision statement - stephen (lead), joe, shawn/claude, jesse, maybe hannah

    • Documents taken into consideration: About FOLIO | FOLIO -
      FOLIO Vision, Strategic Objectives and Initiatives

    • First Draft:

      The Future Of Libraries Is Open

      Community as Vision: The FOLIO community is open to all. Consisting of libraries, developers, vendors, consortia, and networks, we work together to build and maintain an open source library services platform that enables innovation and delivers both traditional and new resource management capabilities to libraries across the world.

      Product as Mission: (Guide/influence/govern/whatever)The community directs the development of FOLIO as an open source platform for libraries that provides choice and protection from vendor lock-in. Its modular, adaptable architecture provides a stable platform to meet current needs while being forward-thinking, empowering libraries to lead innovation, respond to change, and shape their digital futures.

    • Discussion

      • The ”choice” part?

      • It is modular

      • I don’t think we can say “directs the development of FOLIO” — the community does not do that, it does technically “govern” what can be called FOLIO

      • The paper is aspirational

      • Product as “mission” ? What is the community and what we doing?

      • Community and product - both is FOLIO

      • Community as vision: resource capability - discovery is separated out

      • Resource management is more than acq / circ. Isn’t discovery part of it?

      • RM as broad range of library work (“managing the resources of the library”), but is not refering to discovery services

      • I like the word “guides” as opposed to “directs”

      • Maybe we should let it rest as a draft with us annotating it for a couple of weeks?

      • “Direct development” is a critical sentence for TC

        • aspirational or reality based

      • “Directing” is maybe not realistic and shouldn’t be a desire?

    • Paper shall be readressed: may we have a version available for documents

      • Google Doc

      • Action item: please add comments!

Recap of remaining actions from In-Person meeting in DC March 18/19

@Christopher Spalding @Simeon Warner

Agenda/notes:

Review of action items:

  • Small group to develop short-term FY26 changes in membership model/levels - Simeon (lead), Kat, Steven, Kirstin. – See item above

  • Longer term contribution/membership/budget/community responsibility modeling - Christopher (lead), Kat, Simeon, Shawn, Mike

    • Suggest P&L approach breaking down income streams and expense types for dev/maintenance/infra/etc/

    • Christopher (with input from Mike) to do pre-work on costs - Christopher will invite Mike to a pre-meeting this week.

    • Start after April - Christopher will send out invite survey to pull together meeting to discuss MDG and CJS pre-work.

  • Develop approach to measure what the community does and how much it costs now - Tom, Jenn (lead), Shawn, Kat (fly on wall)

    • Want to develop process for ongoing measurement

    • Counting has implicit suggestion of what has value

    • Status?

  • FOLIO Contribution Network - Form group to create a vision for how to cultivate an active healthy software development contribution network: Mike (lead), Boaz, Stephen, Christopher, Kirstin

    • First draft by April 28 CC meeting

  • Group for vision statement - stephen (lead), joe, shawn/claude, jesse - See above

  • Refinement of letter to non-member institutions - Shawn, Joe, Kat

    • Include possibility of end-of-year donation

  • End of year contributions to be pushed via the OLF newsletter. Ask to Hannah Murphy (Christopher) to include.

  • Line item contributions via EBSCO and IndexData hosting

    • Need a description of how funds used

    • CC needs to send to vendors as proposal

    • Naming: 

      • Suggest not membership

      • “Free as in kitten not beer fund”

      • Community operations / test env. / sustainability

    • Scope questions

      • Does it include support for staffing?

      • Need to think about longer term plan so we don’t keep coming back with additional asks

    • Timeline: before WOLFcon

    • How do we take this forward?

      • Group from CC: Simeon, Johanna, Boaz, Stephen → Simeon will schedule a meeting

  • Develop plan for developing blueprint for FOLIO community and software ecosystem and marketplace - Tom

    • DONE -

    • Where do we want to take this?

    • What do we want to do with this blueprint?

    • ACTION - @Simeon Warner to send reminder to review and comment on the document - DONE, CC slack 2025-04-18

    • Suggestion: review and comment on the document and discuss this paper in a future meeting

Who can vote in the forthcoming elections?

 

Comment from @Peter Murray in relation to recent changes in Slack usage for all of OLF:

  • As the Community Council considers the process for this year's elections, may I request reconsideration of who ballots are sent to? In the past, we've used active Jira/Confluence users and active Slack users. It makes less sense to use Slack users this year because the Open Library Foundation Slack now has projects other than http://FOLIO.It has been about 14 months since the Jira/Confluence was migrated from self-hosted to the cloud, and I can easily pull a list of accounts that have been active on folio-org.atlassian.net since the migration.

  • I would propose that the set of users that have logged into FOLIO's Jira/Confluence is likely to be a good proxy for "active in the FOLIO project". Would it make sense to just use that list of people to receive ballots this year?

  • In the past FOLIO project used a combination of the members of Slack with an account registered in Atlassion (for Jira, Confluence)

  • it makes less sense now to use the Slack membership list as the FOLIO memberhsip list, because there are a number of projects that are joining the foundation and starting to use Slack

  • Peters recommendation: only use the Atlassion membership list and break that list down to accounts that have been active after the migration to the Atlassion cloud last year. That would probably be the best representative sample of people who are active in the project. (signed into Atlassion or edit a Wiki page, make a comment on a Jira issue for example)

  • Proposal: we can announce the new procedure on Slack and let them know what they need if they want to vote → create an account

    • agreed

  • Timeline: Time-sensitive and a certain lead time must be taken into account (for a reminder mail, for example)

  • Analysis:

    • There are 1,643 users on Atlassian who have been active in the FOLIO project since 30-Jan-2024

  • AGREEMENT THAT WE WILL FOLLOW THE PROPOSAL TO USE Atlassian MEMBERSHIP AND POST INSTRUCTIONS ON Slack

Draft letter to community members

@Shawn Nicholson @Joseph Grobelny

  • Changes from in-person meeting, see draft letter.

  • Proposal Shawn and Joseph:

    • Give another week for review

    • Then Co Chairs can send the letter out to the members in a first way (EBSCO and Index Data lists, minus existing dues paying member institutions)

  • Deadline for comments and thoughts: end of business Friday

Community support for FOLIO Infrastructure

@Simeon Warner @Shawn Nicholson

Following on from WOLFcon 2024, Shawn, Christopher, Mark Veksler and Simeon had several discussions about what infrastructure (and staffing) should be community supported, as opposed to a requirement for whoever supports a development team or such. Theses discussions were inconclusive the the scope of items was far beyond the community budget. How might we best restart discussions?

  • To raise this discussions again, we need a diversity of voices

  • Proposal: form a larger group (consisting of current and new members of the group).

  • @Mike Gorrell will join that group and and it was suggested that at least one person from the German networks should attend. The aim is to bring in as many perspectives as possible.

  • 2025-04-15 update: @Kirstin Kemner-Heek also agreed to join (on officers' call)

  • ACTION - Simeon to try to bring the group together

 

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