2024-01-23 FOLIO Implementers Meeting Notes

11:01

Smalltalk

• Starting us off with some epistemology, Thomas asks: "Does anyone know anything? That's honestly how I feel half the time."

• We look at Peter's motherboards because they are cool

11:04

Housekeeping

• Last week's notes were approved

• Thomas asks that we continue to think of topics. If any arise, you may post to our slack channel, DM Thomas, or bring them up in a meeting.

11:04

Application and Platform Formalization Working Group

• Jenn Colt joins us to provide updates from the Tri-Council Application and Platform Formalization Working Group (see slides above)

• Jenn's goal is to tell us how people can participate and what to look for, and provide good avenues for people to get involved.

11:06

What is the working group?

• The group has members from all 3 councils. They currently meet every week.

• Their charge is:

  • Describe, document, characterize, and evaluate  the risks and implications of the formalization proposals and develop paths forward to mitigate those risks and  maintain the FOLIO guiding principles

  • Communicate to the larger community the progress, implications, and decisions related to these changes, including providing community-wide updates as significant milestones arise

  • Dialog with the groups designing and implementing these changes in order to gather information for the community, help manage non-technical questions and issues, and provide a conduit for feedback from the community to the proposers and implementers

  • Monitor the progress of the Request for Comment (RFC) process for the RFCs related to these changes to assist in answering non-technical questions and to be able to act as sources of information for council updates and other activities

11:07

What is the problem being solved?

• The flower releases for FOLIO have grown big and complicated. It is unwieldy for systems operators who, for example, have to activate 150 or so modules for every tenant that they upgrade.

• Application formalization takes the modules and sorts them into applications, significantly reducing the work of running FOLIO

• Formalizing applications also gives us the potential to make changes to the release process in order to make it more application-focused. While the technical changes proposed will enable these process changes, additional work by the community will be required in order to actually adopt and benefit from these processes

11:08

What work is happening where? Where are things being discussed?

• Vince and Craig have presented on this topic previously at WOLFcon. The following presentations provide some context:

  • Applications and the management thereof

  • FOLIO platforms

  • Architectural beeprints

  • FOLIO and Next Level AuthN/Z

• Jenn reviews what is in scope and out of scope for the working group:

  • The working group's scope is really communicating with the community about what's happening, and working through the revisions to governance and other processes to make the best use of this development work.

  • Other aspects are handled by the Technical Council's existing processes

11:11

What work is happening now?

• Currently the group is working through a long list of questions that the Technical Council and Product Council created. Some questions are unknowns requiring decisions--there is no extant answer to be found.

• Some members of PC are specifically looking at the grouping of modules into applications. Additionally, they are looking into documentation of their decisions, so that it can be applied consistently moving forward.

• The group has also started thinking about what the release where this first gets adopted will be like, and what will need to be in place for that to happen.

• The group is also thinking about how the Library of Congress's adoption of some of this work will be re-integrated back into the main line of FOLIO.

• The group is also watching the Technical Council's Request for Comments (RFC) process.

11:15

What is the Timeline?

• The timeline has some unknowns, but there is an outline of both tracks of progress (EBSCO/LC track, Community track) on the slides.

11:19

Questions

• Stephanie Larrison asks: are there concerns from either the Technical Council or Tri-Council that were alleviated by answers received to their questions? Are there any outstanding questions about whether we should be doing this or not?

  • Jenn says: There are many outstanding questions.

  • Jenn says: Whether we should be doing this is not a question that is still on the table because it is in progress already for the Library of Congress. The best course of action for the community is to take advantage of that work. There will likely be smaller course-changes emerging as part of the RFC discussions, as the direction is solidified.

• Stephanie asks if any other proposals were considered as a response to the problem of the releases getting too big.

  • Jenn says: as far as I know, no other like fully formed proposals were put forward.

• Marie has the same question as Stephanie.

• Thomas talks about the possibility combining specific apps: mod-circ and mod-circ-storage?

• Tara asks: what effect will this have on end-users? What do the interim stages look like for end users?

  • Jenn says: it will be invisible to end-users. This affects back-end processes. Further down the line, end-users may benefit in ways that result in visible changes.

• Thomas notes that he's interested in which apps are being grouped together and which are being kept separate (inventory and circulation specifically). He asks if they will also be taking the opportunity to reorganize the API endpoints as well.

  • Jenn notes that folks have many questions about the end-results, but that Craig's focus is on the mechanisms. We are discussing years of work and cannot know the end result just yet.

• Darsi notes that she's curious about dependencies and the order in which application are installed. We hope more details will be forthcoming.

  • Jenn notes that Craig said this application layer is on top of what exists now, so conceivably this will actually be more straightforward.

• Kara notes that we're hoping for modules to be more connected, particularly Courses

• Thomas notes that as part of this process, they also have to look at how work and development is being split up, which may lead to positive changes as well.

11:34

Closing

• Call for topics? None are provided. We will let Thomas choose at random.

• THANK YOU JENN COLT!