Open Letter from the Islandora Leadership Group
Islandora Community
Our newly formed Leadership Group has been deep in conversation about how to move the Foundation forward and best serve the community given our recent staff turnover. In the interests of moving forward decisively, we proposed an Executive Director role to fill what we saw as urgent needs in the Foundation.
Since then we’ve received the Islandora Collaboration Group’s thoughtful Systems Testing Report on the current state of Islandora, as well as multiple individual and group responses to the Executive Director proposal (including from IMIG, TAG, and ICC). The Islandora Leadership Group is incredibly thankful to everybody who has provided feedback on Islandora.
Based on that feedback, we propose that the Leadership Group organize conversations within the Islandora Community to review and refine community goals and governance structures, and collaborate on methods to foster an effective community and strong, sustainable codebase. As we engage in these conversations we seek to strengthen community health, together, and build and exercise our commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion. A DEI subgroup of the Leadership Committee has been working on a document of challenges and potential strategies that we hope reflects your feedback and provides a starting point for these discussions.
The following summarizes essential feedback which must be addressed cohesively in our next steps.
Community and Staffing (Executive Director Proposal)
As you recall we had proposed replacing the previous Tech and Community leads with a single Executive Director, and are not planning on proceeding with this proposal in its current form at this time.
The community feedback identified essential roles including:
Project management / Product Ownership
Code management
Community development
The Leadership group would also add financial management/fundraising to this list. We agree that this is too much to ask of one person, and that the roles will need to be distributed across several persons.
We need to develop a revised proposal that explicitly covers these core functions, and are hoping to further workshop our staffing direction with the community.
Roadmap & Technical Direction
The Islandora Collaboration Group report provides valuable recommendations for how to improve Islandora’s accessibility and usability for our community, and highlighted gaps in our communication about Islandora. This report specifically triggered deep questions and discussions within the Islandora Community, and addressing the underlying causes will be wrapped into ongoing organizational development and community building.
In short, we are grateful for the ICGs recommendations, and want to start addressing these in collaboration with the community.
In addition, the TAG and Committer groups raised several questions and concerns about operating without someone in the “Code management” role, which must be addressed in the short term, regardless of where we end up with our long-term plan and we look forward to expanded discussions with those and other groups.
Next Steps
We propose to undertake the following in the next few months :
The Leadership Group will immediately schedule meetings with the TAG and ICC and then reach out to IMIG and other interest groups. This will enable us to move forward with hiring new Foundation staff members and scheduling the other events below.
A community event that generates discussion and ideas for how to structure the Committees and other various bodies of the Foundation to be equitable, sustainable, and inclusive. Please join us with an open and curious mind.
A community-driven sprint focused on creating a new base box (playbook) for Islandora that demonstrates feature parity with Islandora 7, and provides a common starting point for institutions who are just starting to adopt or migrate to Islandora 8.
We are committed to continuing community conversations together and realizing the outcome of all of this hard work.
Sincerely,
On behalf of the Islandora Leadership Group:
John Eden, discoverygarden Inc.
John Herbert, LYRASIS
Mark Jordan, Simon Fraser University
David Keiser-Clark, Williams College on behalf of Islandora Collaboration Group
Gabriela Mircea, McMaster University
Donald Moses, University of Prince Edward Island
Jean Phillips, Florida State University
Noah Smith, Born-Digital
Kirsta Stapelfeldt, University of Toronto Scarborough
Jordan Bass, University of Manitoba
Kirsta Stapelfeldt
Following up on yesterday’s update from the Islandora Leadership Group, The University of Prince Edward Island, the University of Toronto Scarborough, Born-Digital, and discoverygarden have all committed resources to a code sprint and associated community event -- and we need you on our event planning committee!
Please join us as we begin planning events that foster inclusive discussions about staffing models and code development.
The first event planning meeting will take place September 3rd at 10:00 a.m. EDT.
Email me at kirsta.st...@utoronto.ca for an invitation and the Zoom link (or to let me know if you would like to attend or participate in planning, but can’t make this first event).