Open source communities often start with a small group of dedicated individuals working towards a shared goal. As these communities grow and attract members and users, there can be “growing pains” as practices and actions are applied to new contexts and participants. Governance decisions get made informally; funding depends on the next grant; key roles rest on a single person's goodwill and spare time. Addressing these challenges requires stepping back from the day-to-day work and asking harder questions about how a community is actually structured, who has authority to decide what, and where the money comes from.
This is precisely the project that Invest in Open Infrastructure (IOI) supported for the Hyku repository platform, under an IMLS-funded grant led by PALNI and PALCI. Hyku is an open source multi-tenant repository application built on the Samvera-Hyrax framework, used by libraries and library consortia to manage and share digital collections. The goal of this project was to create a structured process to refine decision-making methods as the community moves toward sustainable structures.
Our approach: Deep listening and mapping
IOI's engagement began with deep listening and reading. We reviewed community documentation and conducted in-depth interviews with a cross-section of Hyku stakeholders, including service providers, consortium staff, library practitioners, and developers. That work, completed in Fall 2025, produced a Needs Assessment that mapped the community's current state: what was working, what wasn't, and what areas were ready for dedicated time to develop and grow.
The Needs Assessment became the foundation for Phase 2: a facilitated implementation process with the Sustaining Hyku Steering Group, structured around two parallel workshop series.
Decision-making and collaboration
The first series brought together community members over four sessions to examine how decisions are actually made in Hyku and to begin building a system that would serve the growing community’s needs for greater transparency, stronger involvement, and better documentation.
What surfaced was a familiar pattern in open source communities: decisions were happening, but not in any single, visible place. Some came from interest group meetings, others from technical calls, and others from informal conversations between key individuals. The community lacked a shared understanding of who had authority to decide what, and no reliable place to record and communicate decisions once made.
There was also real tension between the desire for broad participation and the practical need for forward momentum. Community members described fatigue around being consulted on everything, but also frustration when consequential choices — particularly around what gets developed and what ends up in the shared codebase — moved forward without enough input. The group worked through their lived experiences and example scenarios to identify where the right points of friction were, and where streamlined decision-making was appropriate.
A key output of these sessions was a framework for mapping who should be involved in regular community decisions. The sessions also gave formal shape to a named, recognized decision-making body with community-delegated authority.
Financial strategy and community funding
The second series tackled the question that underlies everything else: how does the Hyku community pay for its long-term needs in a sustainable way?
IOI introduced scenario-planning tools, including high-, medium-, and low-budget frameworks, to help the group think concretely about the costs of sustaining Hyku and what a realistic funding model could look like. Participants were candid about the benefits and limitations of the current support structure, which was designed before the Hyku community experienced dramatic growth and development.
The group explored alternatives: tiered contribution levels, end-of-year giving options, project-specific sponsorships, and ways to recognize non-financial contributions. They looked to adjacent models such as consortium dues structures and other membership models for inspiration. One of the key goals was understanding what Hyku actually costs to sustain, and ways to showcase what the community’s contributions were paying for to all of the many different audiences for Hyku.
Throughout, participants kept returning to a core challenge: how do you communicate the value of community membership clearly enough that institutions will commit, when "the code is free, but the labor isn't" is a message that lands differently for a library director than for a developer?
What IOI brings to this kind of work
Communities like Hyku face challenges that sit at the intersection of the technical and the organizational. IOI's role was to provide the scaffolding that allows a community to do work it can't easily do on its own: structured facilitation, proven frameworks, and an outside perspective that can name patterns insiders often can't see.
Starting from the document review and interviews conducted in Phase 1 meant the workshops could engage directly with real challenges rather than hypothetical ones. The structured assignments and deliverables between sessions kept momentum going and ensured that conversations translated into actionable outputs.
What participants said
“Sometimes assessment seems to be done to check something off a list. This process felt like it brought clarity and inspired action.” Rachel Howard, University of Louisville
“The conversational process [in the interview] brought out thoughts that I wouldn't have had if I were just to submit written answers to questions.” -LaRita Robinson, Notch8
“It made a very nebulous set of problems very clear, structured, and manageable.” -Anonymous
“It was both fun and very practical. Tying the two together is very beneficial, and I think helps increase the outcomes... We did a lot of work, but I feel very prepared for the next steps. For a process so short, I'm surprised at how set up for success I feel.” -Emma Beck, University of Louisville
Lessons for the field
This work reinforced several insights that apply well beyond Hyku to any open source community navigating a similar moment:
- A thriving open source community is a feature, and an attractive one. Institutions choose platforms partly on technical merit, but they stay because of the people, the support, and the sense that the project is alive and cared for. Investing in community health isn't separate from the product work; it is part of the product.
- Make time to study your own processes. It's easy to keep moving without stepping back to ask: how are we actually making decisions? What's creating friction, and what's opening up possibilities? Building in that reflection, with structure and outside perspective when needed, is what makes improvement possible.
- The future is more than “what’s next”. Communities under funding pressure often focus on immediate continuity: what happens the day the grant ends? That's necessary, but not sufficient. Making real space to ask where you want to be in three to five years, and then working to identify what kind of community, governance, and funding model would get you there, is what distinguishes a temporary rope bridge from a more permanent foundation.
- Transparency about cost is an act of community trust. One of the most generative conversations in the financial sessions was about what Hyku actually costs to sustain, and how little of that is visible to most users and contributors. Being honest about the true cost of maintaining open infrastructure and communicating it clearly is what allows communities to ask for fair support and for institutions to say yes.
What comes next
The workshop series concluded in February 2026, and the community is already carrying the work forward from the foundation that they built. Community members are gathering more information and developing plans to achieve their sustainability goals. The community plans to share the governance framework with the broader Hyku and Samvera community at Samvera Virtual Connect in May 2026.
The goal — a Hyku community that can sustain itself, make decisions clearly, and broaden its base of contributors — is within reach, and we are excited to see where the Hyku community goes from here.
Interested in working with IOI on sustainability planning for your open infrastructure project? Get in touch at research@investinopen.org.