2023-09-28 Product Council Agenda and Meeting Notes

Clean up Future Product Council Meeting Topics and Incomplete Tasks from Meetings

The Meeting Hygiene Subgroup has been looking at the wiki and documentation. There are old council meeting tasks and topics. Alexis will post these to the slack channel to ask people to resolve these old tasks.

The videos from WolfCon are being uploaded to YouTube now.

A reminder: "Things that could be better about FOLIO". Please add your items by tomorrow 9/29/2023.

It seems we can find a time that works for US ET and Australia/China  (7:00 PM Boston, 8:00 AM Beijing, 9:00 AM Canberra) , or Berlin with China/Australia (2:00 PM Beijing, 4:00 PM Canberra, 8:00 AM Berlin) but finding one that will work for all would be problematic. The best is probably 7 AM Boston, 7 PM Beijing, 9 PM Canberra, 1 PM Berlin. It would be even earlier/later for some of us and other regions may join if we can find a suitable time. Should be consider alternating times once or twice a month? https://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/meetingtime.html?iso=20230928&p1=43&p2=33&p3=57&p4=37

We talked about meeting time inclusiveness. The subgroup met last week and have provided above some options for a larger discussion. It seems like the best way forward is to alternate times according to zones around the world.

Did you get feedback from folks in time zones when there are no meetings? The subgroup reached out to a person in China. They didn't reach out to the folks in Australia. It's not clear who we are trying to reach out to.

The Koha global community does most business through chat. When topics need to be address, they rotate across the glob. Is everyone expected to be there? If it's an important topic, then people make the choice to attend.

Harry had reached out to ask about a platform for forums as an alternative to meetings. There's Discuss which was closed down as this was another platform. Does Slack meet our needs for these types of discussion? Some discussions can get lost.

Koha is much older and mature community compared to FOLIO. In FOLIO, we are still doing very fast development. Having these synchronous meetings is still important.

The other idea floated was that we could have dedicated meetings for geographic regions. This could be a good way of having a venue where people could bring concerns while not ending up having meetings outside their time zone. This could be an implementer style of meeting or we could cycle through topics. One option is to have a meeting for a time zone with different topics and another one just for that time zone.

We need to reach out to more folks like the Australians. Is there a difference between members of the PC and those that just attend? Who else do we reach out?

Can we find a way to use the asynchronous with synchronous methods? Could we use the comments to the agenda document?

Community Council

• Pursued the "Things that could be better about FOLIO" survey - responses due EOD September 29.
• Discussed the "Developer Advocate" Job description/position and budget. Final approval expected within the next week (Slack voting)
• Requesting a new community member step up to manage the translation work for each release. This is roughly 2 hours/week of effort. The writeup is in our last meeting's notes/agenda 
• We are voting on reducing the number of CC members to 13 (from 15) and the votes needed for a quorum to 7 (simple majority). These are recommended due to the realities of the project now vs when the governance model was conceived; the project has changed and to be honest we have less participation than had been anticipated. Also, there are only 13 active members on the council at this time.
• Financially we are on solid ground. Most of this year's membership fees have been received.

Technical Council

• "Regular" TC meeting is now on Mondays for a few months, to accommodate a temporary schedule change, secondary topic-specific meetings are Wednesdays.
• Lists app and related have been conditionally approved and will receive further architectural scrutiny.
  • TC put much effort and discussion into this, the decision was not without controversy. There is a very real concern about timeline pressures and its effect on the integrity of the TC review process.
• Reviewing our processes around Officially Supported Technologies. Often version updates or sometimes new technologies surface late and cause un-budgeted developer work at the last-minute.
• Application formalization: subgroup surfaced a number of questions we expect will come up in the community. Note that these are not proposals yet, still in the form of ideas being circulated. RFC process will be needed to formalize.
• Authentication changes: currently authentication tokens stay active for a very long time. Refresh Tokens Poppy will be a transition period, a new 

Release Management

Will take recommendations for Quesnelia timeline to group

Product Owners

• POs and development teams are working towards Poppy dev freeze (October 6) | Dashboard
• Owen did a great overview on testrails | slide deck
• Khalilah did an overview on Release notes | See wiki page 
• Julie is creating a page for the team to track product owner meeting topics. 
• Encouraging POs to submit ER&L proposals