FOLIO Community Calendar Calming Planning 2026

Overview:

The number of meetings happening in the FOLIO Community is very high. And most meeting slots are double booked. In general the SIGs are meeting once a week, but some do also meet twice a week like the Resource Access SIG. The Councils, here the Product Council meet once a week, Technical Council twice a week, and the Community Council more like once a month.

During 2025 we have noticed a trend that more and more meetings in the community have been canceled and often with short notice. The meetings are typical canceled due to no urgent topics for the agenda or too much to do, so not enough time to plan for the meeting, e.g. the Product Owners bi-weekly meetings.

We do also need to acknowledge that all of us, who are active in the FOLIO Community, also have a ‘day job’, and that goes especially for all active FOLIO members from the libraries, but also all FOLIO members from the vendors and others engaged in the FOLIO work.

So an idea there has been floating for some time and discussed among the PC members, and also with several SIG conveners is that we could try to coordinate an effort, where we up front plan for having weeks scheduled with no FOLIO Community meetings. What we call: FOLIO Community Calendar Calming Planning. These meeting free weeks would then hopefully free up time for all of us, who are being active in the FOLIO community, to do more of our regular work, and better planning for e.g. doing other bigger writing tasks, or just being able to clear the desk.

Goal:

1. Free time for other task/work/bigger writing tasks/project planning etc.

2. Make meetings more efficient

3. Get better work-life balance

Proposal:

We encourage the FOLIO community at large to coordinate to have one week every month where we do not plan for any FOLIO Community meetings. The week can be the last week every month. That would align well with big holidays like the Thanksgiving holiday at the end of November, and holiday and New Year celebration end of December.

In 2026 it would then be following weeks:

This is not a demand, so if a SIG, or one of the Councils have urgent topics to discuss and do need to meet, then that is of course all possible.

Next steps:

We circulate the idea among the SIG and the Councils and others who meet frequently in the FOLIO community. The PC liasions will reach out to each of the SIGs they represents.

The PC co-chairs will do a general announcement on FOLIO Slack.

The PC suggests a trial period - e.g. the first three months of 2026 (January - March)

The PC will evaluate this effort before the end of the first three months on Mar 26, 2026, and decide if the FOLIO Community Calendar Calming Plan is to continue for the rest of 2026.