Special Interest Groups

Existing SIGs

FOLIO Special Interest Groups (SIG)

Charge

FOLIO Special Interest Groups are the project’s community of subject matter experts (SMEs). SIGs serve as FOLIO’s collective authority on topics included in the scoped area of focus (e.g. metadata, sysops, resource access) with expectations for achieving certain outcomes through dedicated engagement. Guided by priorities set out in the FOLIO Vision, Strategic Objectives & Initiatives and  FOLIO Roadmap, SIGs form consensus on FOLIO functionality through the creation of use cases, documents, reactions to prototypes, and code snippets. They also document existing functionality and contribute to user acceptance testing and bug identification to ensure functionality performs as specified. SIGs serve as a forum for product owners, subject matter experts, developers, and end-users to exchange ideas, develop shared goals for the FOLIO project, and research and develop new interchange standards with widely used software. 

The work of a SIG is multi-focused on functionality, user-experience, and documentation. The scope of a SIG’s work includes:

• Providing a regular forum for discussion, in-depth exploration, and task or project recommendation, refinement, or prioritization for a functional domain area, including modules, apps, and related app dependencies.
• Assisting Product Owners with defining functional requirements and providing user stories to inform development.
• Providing regular consultation and collaboration with project leads, functional and technical owners, and other SIGs.
• Identifying, creating, and updating lists of workflow tasks to drive content for FOLIO documentation as well as individual apps info tips, and tricks content to benefit the project and community of end-users.
• Participating in user acceptance testing, quality assurance, regression testing, and troubleshooting issues encountered by implementers.  
• Actively participating in FOLIO governance structures, project outreach and engagement including community on-boarding, progress reporting, assessment, and initiatives as requested.

There are many roles critical for the productivity of a SIG. These include:

•  SIG participants are subject matter experts who make up the dedicated bulk of the group. SIG meetings are generally open to anyone regardless of their involvement in the project, though all participants are expected to abide by the FOLIO Code of Conduct.
  
  • The more active the participants, the more work in a particular domain can be accomplished. Participants are highly encouraged to:
    • Set up a Confluence account and a Slack account, as detailed in FOLIO Communication Spaces
    • Regularly attend and participate in SIG meetings, activities and discussions. 
    • Complete necessary homework, supplying use cases, or performing other preparation outside of meetings as needed.
    • Participate in user acceptance, bugfest testing, regression testing, documentation writing, and other activities as needed.
    • Serve as an institutional representative SME by providing input on the ranking of features, supplying feedback on development, and reporting bugs
    • Leading or serving on ad hoc subgroups or taking on time-limited roles, as needs arise
• SIG convener is a person(s) selected by the group participants to facilitate, and to some extent moderate, the group’s discussions and activities. The convener tries to make good decisions about, for example, at what point rough consensus has been reached and therefore the discussion should move on to another topic. SIG conveners are responsible for onboarding new members. SIGs can have a single convener or up to three co-conveners.  SIG conveners, or a designated subgroup, coordinate meeting agendas and ensure that minutes are posted to the SIG's wiki space.  Conveners, or someone designated by the convener(s), are responsible for communicating SIG activities to the Product Council to promote inter-SIG communication and coordination.
• Product Owner(s) is the person or people who work with the SIG subject matter experts to understand requirements in the SIG's particular area and translate them into user stories for FOLIO development for their product team. A SIG may work with one or more product owner and a product owner may work with one or more SIGs. SIGs that lack a specific functional area (e.g., Implementation or App Interaction/Cross App) may not work with a product owner.
• SIG liaison/rep: someone who volunteers or is designated by the convener(s) to represent the SIG in a separate group and responsible for communicating, advocating, and coordinating specific activities or areas of work as assigned to achieve good utilization of resources (e.g. Documentation Working Group).
• Note taker is the person responsible for taking rough, but organized meeting minutes that capture significant updates, agenda discussion, decisions, and links to related documents, action items or follow-ups. Meeting notes provide an important record of decisions made and actions taken by the SIG. Decisions made by the SIG should be documented in such a way that they can be found and referred to. This can be a dedicated role or done by rotation. 
• Product Council Liaison is the person, generally a Product Council member, who serves as the contact person for the SIG for questions and issues. The PC Liaison should do the following:
  
  • Ensure there is information transfer from PC to SIG to make sure the group is up-to-date
  • Help make connections between SIG or development as needed
  • Help SIG understand how development falls in line with Roadmap and larger product development
  • Provide periodic "health checks" with SIG, check on status, developer resources, etc.
  • Review monthly SIG reports for issues
  • Be part of relevant Slack channels, attends SIG meetings or follows minutes and recordings
    

Although SIG meetings are generally organized by a SIG convener(s) in regular consultation with product owners and on rare occasions developers in the particular area of expertise, all participants of the SIG are encouraged to be active contributors. Decisions are made by lazy consensus (see Product Council charge for a fuller definition), and will be recorded within meeting notes. Meetings are generally recorded as well, and SIG participants can review materials in case of missed meetings. While time contributions may vary depending on the activities of the SIG, active participants can anticipate a contribution of around 2 hours a week on SIG-related work.

SIG Working and Topical Groups

The output of a SIG may vary according to the scope of proposed engagement. SIGs have two variants or models: Working Group (WG) and Topical Group (TG). The following variants articulate types of outcomes according to the general idea of a group’s scope:

Working Groups (WG) have a very focused scope: to produce a specific type of output called a FOLIO Draft.  A FOLIO Draft is a lightweight specification, recommendation, or interoperability document. This can include APIs, user interface designs, technical or process guidelines, etc. FOLIO Drafts should be brief; a WG has no formal ability to make standards or direct the development of software, and therefore Drafts must be easy to implement so that people will use them.

Topical Groups (TG) are the least constrained type of working group. They do not produce outputs, but are essentially discussion groups that take up a subject of interest. The charter of a TG simply describes the intended scope of discussion. 

SIG Creation and Review

Priority SIGs will be generated from goals and deliverables outlined in the FOLIO Roadmap. A SIG is created by way of a Proposal for Engagement.  The proposal should contain the name of the SIG, a paragraph describing the purpose of the SIG, contact information for the convener, the names of those proposed to be members of the group, and (when appropriate) expectations for outcomes from the SIG.  New SIG Proposal for Engagement documents are reviewed by the Product Council to ensure any overlap with other SIGs is intentional and that related SIGs know about each other’s work.  SIGs may revise their Proposal for Engagement at any time, and SIGs automatically renew each year when there is substantial activity in the preceding 12 months.  SIGs that do not meet this requirement may be retired and archived by decision of the Product Council. Check the SIG Setup Checklist for setting up communications resources for your team.

SIG Leadership and Communication 

The SIG convener is a person(s) selected by the group participants to facilitate, and to some extent moderate, the group’s discussions and activities. The convener tries to make good decisions about, for example, at what point rough consensus has been reached and therefore the discussion should move on to another topic. SIGs typically have a single convener, but can have up to three if needed.  SIG conveners coordinate meeting agendas and ensures that minutes are posted to the SIG's wiki space.  Conveners, or someone designated by the conveners, are responsibile for communicating SIG activities to the Product Council to promote inter-SIG communication and coordination.

SIG members agree to abide by the Code of Conduct.  To facilitate activity, SIGs have Wiki space for documents, a Discuss category and Slack channel for asynchronous and synchronous communication, and access to conference call services.  (See Communications wiki page).  SIGs have a name (e.g. “Authentication/Authorization”) and a short token (e.g. “AUTH”) that will be consistently used across all communication platforms.

SIG will have a Category on Discuss with an email address that can receive new Topic submissions.  The Category short name and the username of the email address will be the SIG’s token (e.g. an email address of “auth@discuss.folio.org”).  

Each SIG will be set up as a Confluence Space on https://wiki.folio.org/ and put into the ‘SIG’ category.  The Confluence Space identifier is the SIG’s token.  All SIG members will have a profile in wiki.folio.org that, at a minimum, contains each member’s name, contact information, company/institutional affiliation and job title.   SIG wikispaces will have a blueprint that:

• Records its Proposal for Engagement
• Adds meeting agendas/notes page templates
• Request for Engagement template
• Home page template
  

Each SIG will have a Channel on Slack. The channel name will be the SIG’s short token.