By Phil Weir, Founder and Director of Flax & Teal Limited
Arches Developer Meeting 2025: Strengthening the Global Open-Source Community in Belfast
From April 28–30 2025, forty Arches software developers and technical contributors gathered at the historic Belfast Castle, Northern Ireland, for the second international in-person Arches Developer Meeting. The event was organized by Flax & Teal, with support from the Getty. This three-day gathering drove the advancement of international collaboration and open-source development within the Arches platform community.
The aim of the meetup was multifaceted: to build stronger relationships between international development teams, enable open discussions around development priorities and practices, share recent contributions to the platform, and collectively identify strategies for improving technical collaboration and roadmap planning moving forward.
A Global Gathering for Open Collaboration
The event brought together a diverse range of technical stakeholders from eight countries across Europe and North America, representing more than a dozen organisations actively contributing to or deploying the Arches platform. These included software development firms, public heritage organisations, academic researchers, and conservation specialists. Representing the continued growth of Arches, the event also provided an opportunity to welcome new collaborators to the community.
Over the course of the event, participants shared technical experiences from their own implementations, explored the evolution of core features in the Arches ecosystem, and identified opportunities to streamline workflows through better tooling, automation, and integration.
Beyond the technical, Belfast provided plenty of opportunities for building social relationships across teams, individuals and countries – from Belfast Castle through to the historic John Hewitt Pub and Crumlin Road Gaol, the physical presence of so many Arches developers in one relaxed space helped us to build on those virtual links.
Technical Presentations
A core feature of the event was the series of technical presentations, which spanned frontend and backend enhancements, data integration strategies, user interface improvements, and deployment innovations. Presentations listed below:
- Dive into Arches Lingo & Arches Controlled Lists – Rob Gaston (Farallon Geographics)
- Migrating RDM Data to Arches Lingo and/or Arches Controlled Lists – Johnathan Clementi (Farallon Geographics)
- Demonstrating integrations with Arches – Samuel Scandrett & Rob Tice (Knowledge Integration)
- From Talks to Workflows – Jana Lorencova (Flax & Teal)
- Making Your Models SPIFFIE – Sjoerd Siebinga (Delving B.V.)
- Attribute Based Permissions in Arches – Aaron Gundel (Farallon Geographics)
- Accelerating Arches Application Development with Arches QuerySets – Jacob Walls (Farallon Geographics)
- High Performance Reporting in Arches Using Vue – Alexei Peters (Farallon Geographics)
- Dashboarding in Arches – Stuart Marshall (Flax & Teal)
- Frontend Development and Vue Integration in Arches v8 – Christopher Byrd (Farallon Geographics)
- A K-Int Showcase on New Core Features – Samuel Scandrett & Chris Damm (Knowledge Integration)
- CSV Import for Getty Provenance Index – Mike Griniezakis (Advance deep-tech Services)
- Reworking SQL Migration Strategy – Brett Ferguson (QED Systems, Inc.)
- Evolving Search in Arches: an LLM-interpreted NLP proposal and Leveraging Resource Relations in Search Results – Galen Mancino (Scholium Technologies)
- Developing a Custom Search Plugin to Manage Reference and Sample Collections in Arches – Cyrus Hiatt (Farallon Geographics)
- Using the Esri Mobile App for Arches Field Data Collection – Namjun Kim (Farallon Geographics)
- Extrados: An External Layer for Arches Deployments – Owen McEvoy (Galvia Digital)
- Using Open Data Kit (ODK) for Digital Field Surveys: Exploring ODK & Arches Data Integration Solutions – Junaid Abdul Jabbar (University of Cambridge)
- Updates to the Arches QGIS Plugin – Samuel Scandrett (Knowledge Integration)
Many of these presentations were recorded and will soon be published on the Arches Project YouTube Channel and Arches Videos page, allowing the broader community to engage with the meeting’s insights.
Day 3: Unconference and Open Technical Dialogue
The final day was structured as an unconference, enabling attendees to propose and lead discussions on critical issues in the Arches development ecosystem. Topics included:
- Controlled vocabularies and system-wide “lingo”
- Deprecating legacy features responsibly
- Application management & cross-project migration strategies
- Arches + GraphQL integration
- VueJS component modularity and use with Spiffie
- Search backend flexibility (Celery, PostgreSQL, etc.)
- Management of raw SQL assets and query abstraction layers
- Permissions modelling and system graph configuration
- Sustainable development practices and feature duplication reduction
Looking Ahead
The Arches Developer Meeting 2025 garnered positive feedback and we hope it contributed to strengthening the developer community, aligning on shared priorities, and surfacing key technical challenges. Flax & Teal is proud to have played a pivotal role in bringing together contributors from across the globe to shape the future of open digital heritage tools.
We look forward to continued collaboration, shared codebases, and a future of more sustainable, user-centred, and interoperable digital infrastructure for cultural heritage and beyond. We are already excited for next year!
