The 2026 Evergreen International Conference took place this past April at the Hyatt Regency Lake Washington at Seattle’s Southport in scenic Renton. Huge thanks to our hosts from the King County Library System and BJ Colvin and his team for all their work that made this event possible!
At the conference, the Evergreen Project had its annual meeting, the first annual meeting of the organization as a membership organization. The membership program has been off to a great start, with 36 individual members, plus 13 metal-level member organizations, and 2 sustaining member libraries, all having joined in just the first 6 months since the program began.
The agenda of the annual meeting included community reports and board committee reports, the election of the slate of board members as determined by the vote of the membership in March 2026, and a discussion of the Evergreen Project’s draft Mission and Vision statements.
While we’ve all groaned at this sorts of thing at the office, these statements are part of the IRS’s reporting requirements for tax-exempt nonprofit organizations, so we need them, and they should ideally mean something to the community.
The board brought draft statements for discussion, which were then tweaked by the community and formally adopted by the project board at the regular meeting the following week.
Mission:
The Evergreen Project exists to foster the open-source Evergreen Integrated Library System (ILS) software and its community of practice. The Evergreen Project engages in activities to promote, support, and advance the development of the Evergreen ILS software; support and facilitate the growth of the international community of Evergreen ILS software users; and to cultivate, manage, and protect the assets of the Project.
Vision:
We envision a growing, healthy international community supporting Evergreen as a flexible, modern, and feature-competitive open-source library software platform suitable for use at many types of libraries and library consortia.
Also on the agenda for the annual membership meeting was a discussion of what sorts of projects the community would like to see the project board take on in pursuit of this now-articulated mission and vision for the project. A document was shared for feedback, and attendees threw out ideas and talked about what they’d like to see the project work on. A total of 23 ideas were proposed across the three main goals stated in the mission.
The next steps on this work will happen at the project board meetings over the next few months, as the community feedback from this session, and the discussion at the conference, and the support provided by our members, turns into action in pursuit of the mission of the Evergreen Project!
A big thank you to all of our users, contributors, supporters, question-askers, question-answerers, event planners, presenters, developers, administrators, collaborators, community members, project members, and most of all our library patrons for this beautiful, hopeful, extremely complicated thing we all do together, to help each other.
Stay tuned to board meetings and listservs for updates, and if you’re not already a member of the Evergreen Project, consider joining today!