Duration: August 2025 – January 2026
Team: Katherine Skinner, Lauren Collister, Emma Green
Skillset Governance Model Development, Capacity Building, Convening / Facilitation, Business Development Advisory
Overview
Hyku is a well-regarded open-source digital repository platform and a cornerstone of the Samvera Community. The libraries, archives, and research institutions that use Hyku rely heavily on it to manage collections, preserve digital content, and provide access to the things they steward.
Hyku had been sustained largely through grants, but the Sustaining Hyku Steering Group, led by PALNI and PALCI in partnership with the Samvera Community, knew that model had a ceiling. If the platform was going to last, the institutions that depend on it needed to help fund it.
But the gap between intention and execution tends to open up in the same places: unclear ownership of decisions, no agreed model for what fair contribution looks like across institutions of very different sizes, and governance structures that either exclude too many voices or move too slowly to be useful.
The steering group needed a partner who understood both the technical realities of open infrastructure and the community dynamics that make or break a sustainability model. That's where IOI came in.
What we did
We started by talking with people: steering group members, institutional users, technical contributors, and people working in adjacent open tools communities. The point wasn't to arrive with a governance template and fit Hyku into it. It was to understand what capacity the community actually had, where the real friction was, and what models were realistic rather than just theoretically sound.
From there, we worked alongside community members to build the governance structures they'd use. That meant facilitating a series of governance design sessions to work through questions like who holds decision-making authority, how different stakeholder groups relate to each other, and what accountability looks like when things are running well and when they're not.
We also ran two focused financial strategy sessions, developing budget projections through 2029 and mapping out a realistic funding mix: co-investment pledges from institutions, services revenue, in-kind contributions, and grant support where it makes sense.
Throughout, we created documentation designed to provide high value and utility. The frameworks, models, and roadmaps we co-created allowed the community to fully own and use them after we left — not to sit in a folder.
Outcomes and impact
By the end of our engagement, the Hyku community had the foundations in place to govern and fund itself.
- Clear mechanisms for community input and decision-making, including a stakeholder map and governance framework that makes explicit who owns which decisions, how different groups relate to each other, and how accountability works day to day.
- The tools to run a fundraising campaign and launch a membership model, including a multi-year budget built around realistic projections through 2029 and a diversified funding strategy that doesn’t depend on any single source.
- An implementation roadmap with specific milestones the community can use to track progress, and a collaboration model designed to prevent duplication across the ecosystem as individual institutions pursue their own priorities.
- A community collaboration model that enabled effective coordination while preventing duplication across projects and stakeholder groups.
Most organizations face this transition eventually. Don’t face it alone.
Grant funding is how a lot of open infrastructure gets started. It's rarely how it survives long-term. At some point, the community that relies on a platform may decide to become the community that funds it, and building the governance and financial architecture for that shift takes more than goodwill. It takes a structured process, clear thinking about what's realistic, and often an outside perspective to bring expertise and keep things moving.
If your infrastructure is facing a similar transition, or if you're a funder trying to structure investments that build genuine sustainability rather than dependency, we would love to discuss how IOI can support you.
Project outputs
Impact by the numbers
- The above work strengthens the governance and financial resources for Hyku to benefit these 103 institutions who are members of the consortia that we worked directly with.
- PALCI has 80 organizational members with access to Hyku
- PALNI has 23 organizational members with access to Hyku
- 28 members of Samvera Partners, who benefit as well from participatory governance of Hyku and strengthening the relationships between Hyku users, developers, and the Samvera board.
- In addition, AMIGOS consortia has more than 100 members - 5 of which participate in Hyku so far — we have helped to strengthen the service available to them and encourage further uptake of Hyku.
