By Samuel Scandrett, Head of Arches at Knowledge Integration

Over a 3 day period from June 8th to 10th 2026, 44 Arches developers, modellers and technical collaborators gathered at the Millennium Gallery, in the historic industrial city of Sheffield, England, for the third international in-person Arches Developer Meeting. This 3 day event, hosted and organised by Knowledge Integration, with the support of the Getty Conservation Institute, provided a forum to promote open-source collaboration and showcase a worldwide, continued commitment to Arches. Sheffield (the “Steel City”, rich in industrial history, heritage and geography), provided the perfect backdrop. 

The purpose of the Arches Developer Meeting is to provide a platform for developers to share their work with Arches, engage in open discussions on various priorities and issues, build and strengthen relationships, and plan the future of Arches as a community. This year’s developer meeting focused heavily on the technical future of Arches, including software/schema “contracts” and creating a more modular Arches architecture, to allow developers to build, share, and maintain extensions without risking core system stability. 

Collaborating in New Surroundings 

The 2026 meeting brought together a range of attendees from 17 organisations across 7 countries in Europe and North America, each playing an active role in contributing to, or implementing the Arches platform. Representation included independent software service providers, public heritage agencies, conservation organisations, and academic institutions. The event provided an opportunity to welcome new stakeholders into the community, and introduce a new Technical Advisory Committee member, demonstrating the continued expansion of the Arches Project community and its Governance structure. 

In addition to the rewarding, high-level technical discussions, the 2026 meeting gave attendees the opportunity to build new relationships and strengthen existing ones, whilst also providing opportunities to explore historic (and not so historic) sites across Sheffield. These included the Millennium Gallery (showcasing exhibitions of local artists), popular watering holes (including The Fargate and The Gardener’s Rest), with a particular highlight being the Kelham Island Museum (home of the River Don Engine – the most powerful working steam engine in Europe).

Technical Presentations 

The first 2 days were dedicated to community technical presentations. These presentations, listed below, included improvements to Arches processes, new visualisation methods, and frontend and backend enhancements often packaged as new Arches extensions.

All presentations were recorded and will very soon be made available on the Arches Project YouTube Channel and Arches Videos page. Please be aware that since direct screen recordings were not available at the venue, technical demonstrations were recorded using the cameras and therefore at a low quality. We apologise for any inconvenience.

• Use of Zod for JS Schema Validation – Brett Ferguson (QED Systems)
• The DRIFT project, Building Classification and Rapid Vulnerability Evaluation in Post-Earthquake Reconnaissance – Marianna Ercolino (Brunel University of London)
• Starches: Static Arches with Dynamic Search – Stuart Marshall (Flax & Teal)
• Working with linked data – Enhanced CSV Import/Export and Bulk Data Merges – Mala Mathur (Getty Digital), Georgia Moysaki (Advance Services)
• Adding an Accessibility CI test to GitHub – Paul Hudson (Historic England)
• Arches Lintels – lowering the barrier to entry for Arches – Samuel Scandrett (Knowledge Integration)
• Lingo 1.0 and Arches 8.1: Lessons Learned and the Future – Rob Gaston (Farallon Geographics)
• Pletka: Establishing Semantic Ground Truth and Long-term Documentation Pathways for Arches Deployments – Denitsa Nenova (Takin.solutions)
• Interfaces & Schemas – Phil Weir (Flex & Teal)
• So, Where Do You See Yourself in 5 Years? – Dennis Wuthrich (Farallon Geographics)
• ETL, aka How the Data Travels – Jana Lorencova (Flex & Teal)
• Making Arches Records Easier to Read: a Practical Look at Rule-Based Display Descriptors – Rob Oates (Historic England)
• Arches Container Tool CLI – Andy Jones (Historic England)
• Arches CIIM Integration: Low-Code Configurable Extract-Load-Transform (ELT) – Sam Cameron (Knowledge Integration)
• The Arches Search Extension – Christopher Byrd (Farallon Geographics)
• Kibana for Arches: Setup, Dashboards, and Limitations – Junaid Abdul Jabbar (University of Cambridge)
• AMAL in Heritage: An App for Rapid Conservation Assessments for Arches – Laura Cook, Paul Burtenshaw (World Monuments Fund)
• Editing in Modular Reports and Using Search to Drive Dashboarding – Alexei Peters (Farallon Geographics)
• Arches Auditing – Chris Damm (Knowledge Integration)
• Migrating Models and Tile Data for Arches Application Versioning – Cyrus Hiatt (Farallon Geographics)
• Initiatives from Arches Project Governance – Kevin Kochanski (Getty Conservation Institute)

Unconference for Technical Discussions

The 3rd and final day consisted of an unconference format, allowing attendees to lead and participate in conversations of their choosing. Topics were informed by the previous days’ presentations, in addition to current and relevant issues, and included:

• Arches Modularisation
• Mobile & Offline Arches Data Collection
• Lingo Ecosystem
• Permission Frameworks
• Documentation Evaluation
• Arches Software Catalog
• Security
• Data Migration Paths
• Graph Migrations
• CSV Import & Export
• Arches Search Extension

Event Outcomes 

The lively and engaged discussions during the unconference resulted in a number of key action items. 

The Arches Software Catalog Initiative builds on a prototype created and demonstrated by Rob Gaston during the 2026 Arches Developer Meeting. The Arches Software Catalog will provide a central directory of current Arches applications, extensions, integrations, and tools, maintained by both the core team and community contributors. The key actions include further defining user submission criteria, licensing standards, and assigning long-term maintainers to prevent “abandonware.”

As Arches plans to transition its software architecture, a Modularisation Working Group is required to establish clear boundaries between core and extensions. Since the meeting, Dennis Wuthrich has posted a call for participation on the Arches Project Forum to form a Modularisation Working Group, which invites anyone in the community to provide input into these decisions: https://community.archesproject.org/t/arches-modularization-working-group/3181/2. 

The community has seen a wide variety of permission-focused needs based on scale and nature of different projects. As such, a Permissions Working Group was suggested to discuss an aligned approach to permissions and access management in Arches.  Following the meeting, Phil Weir posted a call for participation on the Arches Project Forum: https://community.archesproject.org/t/arches-permissions-working-group/3187 

Discussions on the Arches documentation identified the need for a coordinated effort to clean up the documentation content and improve clarity for both core Arches and Arches Applications. Feedback identified that documentation requirements differ depending on use case, including end-users, developers, or implementers using the API, and guidance on structure could assist with user navigation and contribution.

Hackathon

To round off the 2026 developer meeting, attendees were invited to join the post-meeting hackathon on June 11th, taking place at the Kelham Island Museum in Sheffield. This gave attendees the opportunity to work alongside their fellow Arches developers, exploring and developing ideas that were fresh in their minds after the previous days’ discussions. Attendees dedicated time to develop and submit packages to the Arches Software Catalog, collaboratively explore permissions frameworks, develop new Arches components, and elaborate on information and topics presented over the previous days. 

Looking Ahead

The 2026 meeting in Sheffield marked a clear shift in the Arches project’s maturity. It was an opportunity to spotlight how our developer community is ensuring that Arches remains the primary open-source platform for safeguarding cultural heritage and environmental data for decades to come. 

Knowledge Integration are delighted to have hosted this successful Arches Developer Meeting, and thank all attendees for travelling from across the world to dedicate time to building relationships and collaborating with the technical community. We hope it provided an environment for attendees to engage in conversation, collaborate on relevant issues and priorities, and contribute to the overall growth of the Arches community.

We are already counting the days to next year’s meeting!