2023-08-25 Meeting notes

Craig McNally will take notes

All/ Jeremy Huff 

Jeremy Huff's availability is changing and will be unable to join the regular TC meetings on Wednesday.  This will be the situation for ~2.5 months (into December) starting 19 Sep 2023 .

• Douglas Hahn has offered to serve as his proxy / interim fill-in.
  
  • This would be the first time the TC has done something like this
• What about co-chair duties?
  • Step down?
  • Proxy could fill in?
  • No co/deputy chair for this time period?
• What are the co-chair duties?
  • Backup for running meetings 
  • Folio chairs meetings/discussions
• Another option may be to change the meeting day/time.
  • This has been a challenge in the past.
  • Maybe swap the Monday / Wed. meetings.
• Let's give it some thought and make a decision next week

• Dashboard - widget registration and management
  • Do we want/need something in Stripes for this?
  • Idea: Centralized, generic object registry in Stripes
    • Could be a soft dependency
    • Dynamic or Static?
      • Build-time or runtime?
    • Question:  Jakub Skoczen - Is this similar to the plugin concept?
      • Jeremy Huff - I was thinking it was more like centralized configuration
    • Zak Burke - related this to JIRA dashboards
  • Zak Burke - Current implementation is somewhat specific to ERM, but it wouldn't be difficult to make it more generic
  • Tod Olson - How would this affect the concepts proposed wrt applications?  Would it be part of "Folio Core"
    • Zak Burke  - Yes.  It doesn't seem like there are any blockers.
  • VBar - There were discussions years ago about a "card" interface, which is similar to what we're talking about with the dashboard (widget ~= card)
  • Jeremy Huff - the widgets are essentially an "object" in the JS sense.  So the idea is these could be registered in a simple Key/Value store
  • VBar  - Maybe the applications would provide widget definitions
  • Jeremy Huff is looking at this from the perspective of the work he's doing in the context of workflows
    • It's a mechanism for UI modules to declaratively specify things they provide
  • Jakub Skoczen - What we're really talking about is a registry of things which other parts of the UI can use 
    
    • Enables greater reusability of UI "components" (dynamically, not just statically)
  • Taking a closer look at the workflow use case, the current impl. works at the interface level of granularity
  • Should workflows be defined in a central way (in the workflow engine), or distributed to the various applications
    • There are tradeoffs - flexibility vs maintainability
  • The goal is to provide something that a librarian (with some training) could use w/o needing to be a developer
  • Mark Veksler - are there concerns about someone screwing things up for others?
  • Tod Olson - permissions would need to be carefully assigned 
  • Jeremy Huff - there are a lot of considerations in the area of permissions/security
  • Tamu is interested in putting in time/effort on this
  • Jenn Colt Tie-in to prefect
    • Jeremy Huff - this would be an optional thing - e.g. "advanced mode" which could be enabled/disabled
  • Jeremy Huff - The workflow engines are out there, what we're trying to build is a way to integrate these with FOLIO
  • Jenn Colt - We should be careful that we're not building things which are redundant
  • Maccabee Levine - This goes back to the SIGs defining the workflows
  • Jeremy Huff - the workflow engine's role is ideally orchestration or functionality provided by applications
  • Tod Olson - It would be helpful to pull together a set of concrete use cases/examples
  • Jeremy Huff - Does the TC want to see 2 RFCs?
    • Workflow engine
    • Generic component registry
  • Yes - multiple RFCs makes more sense
• Maccabee Levine  - Translations
  • There was a comment from Massoud Alshareef during one of the sessions about multi-language support
  • Maccabee Levine - The TC may want to resurface this - The TCR had been closed as it was difficult to get engagement from the contributors
  • Zak Burke - proposed an idea of a proxy, enabling translations of API responses
  • Tod Olson this is a DEI / market concern - is Folio alienating multi-lingual markets?
  • Jakub Skoczen - Zak Burke can you summarize the Kware solution?
    • The solution focused on translations at the Stripes level, not in the API
  • Jeremy Huff it would have been better if we were reviewing an RFC, not a TCR
  • Instead of jumping directly into a solution, having a discussion about various options would lead to a solution benefiting broader swathes of the community
  • Next steps?
    • Additional discussion in the form of an RFC about how to handle translations at the API level
    • Requirements gathering
    • Form a working group which could do both?
      • This seems like the right approach.
      • Zak Burke - We need a champion with an eye to identify and design a solution which works for the broader community

Previous Notes:

• A workflow for these pages. When do they transition from one state to another. Do we even need statuses at all ?
• Stripes architecture group has some questions about the Poppy release.
• Zak: A handshake between developers, dev ops and the TC. Who makes that decision and how do we pass along that knowledge ? E.g. changes in Nodes and in the UI boxes. How to communicate this ? We have a large number of teams, all have to be aware of it.  TC should be alerted that changes are happening. We have a couple of dedicated channels for that. Most dev ops have subscribed to these channels. How can dev ops folk raise issues to the next level of community awareness ? There hasn't been a specific piece of TC to move that along.
• Craig: There is a fourth group, "Capacity Planning" or "Release Planning". Slack is the de facto communication channel.  There are no objections to using Slack. An example is the Java 17 RFC. 
• Craig: The TC gets it on the agenda and we will discuss it. The TC gets the final say.
• Marc Johnson: We shouldn’t use the DevOps Channel. The dev ops folks have made it clear that it should only be used for support requests made to them.
• Jakub: Our responsibility is to avoid piling up technical debt.
• Marc: Some set of people have to actually make the call. Who lowers the chequered flag ?
• Craig: It needs to ultimately come to the TC at least for awareness. There is a missing piece. Capacity Planning needs to provide input here. 
• Marc: Stakeholders / Capacity Planning could make that decision. Who makes the decision ? Is it the government or is it some parts of the body ?
• Marc: the developers community, the dev ops community and sys ops are involved. For example the Spring Framework discussion or the Java 17 discussion. But it was completely separate to the TC decision. It is a coordination and communication effort.
• Marc: Maybe the TC needs to let go that they are the decision makers so that they be a moderating group.
• Jakub: I agree with Marc. But we are not a system operating group. Dependency management should be in the responsibility of Release management. There are structures in the project for that.
• Jason Root: I agree with Jakub and with Marc also. Policies should drive operational/release/support aspects of Folio.
• Jason Root: If the idea of “support” is that frameworks are supported, then of course the project should meet that.
• Marc Johnson
  Some group needs to inform OleksAii when a relevant policy event occurs.
  These documents effectively ARE the manifestation of the policy.
• Craig: This is a topic for the next Monday session.

• Craig to see if Oleksii Petrenko could join us to discuss the process for updating the officially supported technologies lists.