2023-03-01 Meeting notes

Ankita Sen is next, followed by Jakub Skoczen 

All

Nothing to review. 
TCR-9 needs to be wrapped up. Craig McNally will catch up with Zak Burke next week for latest status.

Maccabee Levine / Tod Olson 

Any updates from the PC and/or CC?

CC:

• Jenn Colt presented our charter revision and CC approved it!
• AWS grants program ended, which had saved ~ 3 months of payments last FY.  Also unexplained $5k jump last month.
• Second-phase resourcing group will start.  Small size but PC and TC should be included.  Jakub Skoczen interested.
• WOLFcon will tentatively be in Chicago August 22-24.

PC:

• PO recruitment: Khalilah Gambrell spoke about the needs and a success story from the WOLFcon drive, defining clear expectations is key. There is a need to make the role appealing, so benefits to individuals and institutions are apparent.
• Council updates
• Support SIG: how move bugs forward when there is no longer a development team? Khalilah is thinking about a proposal.
• How to accommodate when an institution reaches out with developers? Video from 2017 is out of date. Likely involves lead PO. (But this seems like lumping more work onto one person.) Noted that TC has a bullet about onboarding in draft charter. (See resulting TC Slack conversation.)

Meeting notes 01.03.2023:

CC:

Craig McNally - Need a bit more details on Second-phase resourcing group will start mentioned in the CC updates

Maccabee Levine - First phase evaluated a no. of resources and models that FOLIO community might operate under a lightly centralized model and this second phase which is defined will do a bit more work on distinguishing this with the current situation in the community and a few other tasks which are at the moment TBD... Marc Johnson might be able to expand on that..

All

• TC Goals and Objectives - Skip the updates, will be discussed later as part of the agendas today.

• Translations Subgroup - No updates. Craig McNally will reach out to Zak Burke to get status updates.

• Controlling AWS hosting costs - Craig McNally - Peter was invited today to talk about the recent $5000 jump in hosting costs and provide some insights. Peter Murray - Major costs seems to be driven by Full stacks of FOLIO using EKS clusters, and other services such as RDS(for database), OpenSearch and so. A number of teams are using these installations and the recent cost jumps came from installing a 4th environment which stays on 24/7.(Teams- Bulk-edit, firebird,folijet and spitfire). Even though cost monitoring is being done by Peter but he has is no control over what the developers are doing with those environments and he is not as involved with this part of the project as he was during the early FOLIO days. Craig McNally - The last update was provided by Mark Veksler on the kubecost tool developed and rolled out by the Kitfox team was providing more insight into what exactly was driving up those costs. Peter Murray - kubecost is a good tool for determining the costs being incurred by the scratch environments because the resources are within on single cluster and namespaces are allocated to those teams working in the scratch environments but the recent costs are driven from individual full FOLIO environments which are being spun up. Jenn Colt - What is the process of spinning these full FOLIO environments? According to Jenn's knowledge there should be overlap in these environments, eg. bulk-edit is the same as firebird(?). Peter Murray - There is no oversight. Historically these teams have been given AWS admin rights so there is currently no request process for spinning up these environments as such and no strict access control on these folio accounts. In the early stages this approach was good but probably this is not a good approach anymore. Craig McNally - This topic needs to be revisited again. Jeremy Huff - It would be the TCs job to encourage the project to adopt some procedures around this issue. Craig McNally - The agenda topic with Mike Gorrell about how Project Finances are being managed will overlap with Jeremy Huff 's question. If enough is not discussed in the agenda, this topic can be added as an agenda item next week.

• Breaking changes - Jeremy Huff - Draft PR is in, few people were absent so one more meeting is needed before we finally submit it next week. Craig McNally - Olamide Kolawole 's RFC has been moved to Public review recently, so can this RFC wait untill the one in progress is done and the process is improved or do we want to go on parallelly? Jeremy Huff - Willing to start the RFC review parallelly to keep the momentum of the subgroup going. Marc Johnson - We might get more RFCs so in general it's not advisable to wait since each of these takes months to complete.

• https://github.com/folio-org/rfcs/pull/6
  • We agreed to move this to the Public Review stage at the 27 Feb 2023 dedicated topic discussion.
  • Can we wrap up the subgroup now?
• https://github.com/folio-org/rfcs/pull/5
  • Where does this stand?

Meeting Notes: 

Jeremy Huff 's breaking changed RFC will be reviewed starting next week.

Jeremy Huff - For https://github.com/folio-org/rfcs/pull/6 Subgroup, do we let the members of the Subgroup meet one last time to decide the Slack channel for communicating, then the subgroup can be wrapped up. Next week further discussion.

All/ Mike Gorrell 

Conversation about how funding decisions are made in the CC, and what role the TC plays in that decision making process, if any at all.  

If the TC perceives a need for specific resources, how is that conveyed to the CC?

Craig McNally - Started from CC update from Maccabee Levine who informed that one of the developer's funding is being discontinued from this Summer and wondered how these decisions are taken? 

Mike Gorrell -

• How FOLIO get's it funding as a project and how the funds are distributed?
  • There are various membership levels in which we solicit engagements from different organisations which are part of FOLIO both Vendors ( eg. Index Data, EBSCO, K.Int) and individual institutions as well as network consortia are solicited.
  • Process started about 3 years ago. Originally it was 3 organisations which took on the task of development and launch of FOLIO - Index Data, EBSCO and OLE libraries. Later it changed to the current membership model.
  • Revenue which the project gets is from $190,000-$300,000/year.
  • CC decides based on the above given number the budget for the year and decides how the project can continue it's ongoing activities or whether any change is needed.
  • Generally 2 developers were maintained but uncertainty about revenue was there, but the second developer left the community funding aspect, joined EBSCO and continued working for the project so it was easier to maintain the one developer using the community funds.
  • This year, the financial  projections made by the project treasurer Paul Solinger show that through this fiscal year the developer can continue to be funded and the CC has also decided to set up a reserve with funds for running the Project for 6 months. 
  • The recurring expensed right now are the AWS hosting costs ($60,000/year), the licences for Testrails, and other software licenses such as slack, JIRA, etc are paid for.
  • After payment of all these, the 6 month worth reserve couldn't be created(3 months worth was created) , and with the projections of the revenuew which should come in the next Fiscal year maintaining the developer in the next fiscal year looks difficult.
  • Apart from the CC other councils are not yet made part of the budget decisions since also people from both PC and TC sit on the CC as well.

Craig McNally - 1.  is a Visualisation of how the budget breaks down, a wiki page exists but seems a little out of date? 2. Is it encouraged that the TC as whole discuss about budget requirements and breakdown directly instead of going through the CC.

Maccabee Levine - There is no disagreement about the CC taking into it's hands the budget breakdown and planning. But the communication mode should be directly via the chairs or the CC slack channels? 

Jeremy Huff - Maybe a cross council budget subgroup can be created which meets once a while to discuss and communicate the current standings.

Mark Veksler - The high AWS costs were due to testing of a few new things due to which a few new environments were spun up for the development teams. Those environments will be shut down before the beginning of the bug fest. It was just a temporary glitch. 

Jenn Colt 

• Update from Jenn Colt 

Update done. See TC Subgroups section.

Craig McNally 

• TC dedicated discussion:  06 Mar 2023 11:00 AM ET
  • Nothing planned - Cancel this week's dedicated discussion?

Tod Olson 

Goal: wrap up this effort/working group.

What needs to happen to get us there?

Tod Olson - All we need is votes whether to accept the documentation. Asked people to read on and give their votes. 

Craig McNally - Move it up the agenda next week and give people one more week to go through the updated documentation.

Craig McNally /All

Craig McNally /All

From Craig McNally in #tech-council:

This was brought to my attention earlier today...
https://blog.nlnetlabs.nl/open-source-software-vs-the-cyber-resilience-act/
While it's still just a proposal, I think FOLIO should keep an eye on, and maybe even try to get ahead of in anticipation of this.  I will add it to the agenda for next week's meeting.  This is a short read that does a decent job of laying it all out.  Please take a look prior to next Wednesday.  Thanks! 

• Have folks had a chance to read through any of this?
• What, if anything do we think the TC should do about this?
  • Raise awareness among other councils?
  • Seek legal advice in anticipation of this being passed?
  • Is there anything else we want to do to be more prepared for this in the event it does get passed?

Today: Deferred

All / Ian Walls 

From last week:

• Ease of installing/deploying FOLIO - Ian Walls Jeremy Huff
  •  Primary task the Tc would take on by making FOLIO easier to get up and running. Would also reduce AWS costs so that the money coming from Membership groups can be flowed to other aspects of FOLIO. Tc is the best equipped group to decide on how to make installing and deploying Folio easier and cheaper.
  • Craig McNally - Brainstorming open ended session with Ian Walls and then discuss further before or after WOLFcon depending on the brainstorming session. Ian Walls and Tod Olson to frame the topics of discussion for the brainstorming. 

Today:

• Probably defer, but keep on the agenda so we don't lose track of this...

All / Ian Walls 

Slack discussion:  Revisiting FOLIO Governance 

• • Ian Walls - should be best discussed in cross council meeting possibly at WOLFcon. Idea to was bring this up at a high community level not necessarily the Pc or TC. Doesn't need to be on TC agenda next week. Aspects to be discussed at WOLFcon.
  • See also:  messages to PC and CC council channels