2025-06-12 Product Council Meeting Notes

5 min

Announcements and PC Calendar review

@Alexis Manheim

Upcoming meetings Product Council Topic Calendar 2025. June 19th meeting is cancelled. For meetings on 6/26 and 7/3, they will be there if we need this time. The planning session is cancelled for 6/24.

LC is now live for the Congressional Research Service and Library for the Blind and Disabled. The rest will be done on the 30th.

PC nominations 2025 Product Council Elections . Officially due Friday and there are 6 people up on the election page. There are some open seats for TC and some people are still considering.

WolfCon updates @Jesse Koennecke @Jennifer Eustis . We hope to have a preliminary agenda out by next week. Speakers will be notified soon and this year we’ll be having a pre-conference zoom introduction for them.

10 min

Eureka early adopters updates

@Jeremy Huff @Charlotte Whitt
@Kirstin Kemner-Heek GBV, Texas A&M, Index Data

GBV: GBV is still customizing the EBSCO reference enviroment to GBV needs. This includes using the official Sunflower release to proof ist usability. This requires the creation of our own application composition and we are still working on the concept, methods and tools to accomplish this. Time line still open.

Jeremy: Texas A&M is putting Eureka efforts on hold to upgrade to Ramsons. They will get back to Eureka probably with the Trillium release. Ramsons can be used as a pivot point for Eureka.

15 min

Community Directed Development and Support for Ramsons on Okapi

@Jeremy Huff

There have been a couple of meetings. The membership includes members from all Councils. The conversation is scoped by the role of Ramsons support. The group is leaning towards a more general model for community support. This could be used for Ramsons support but this is separate and would go through governance.

Definition: Community Directed Development (CDD) is a FOLIO process whereby the FOLIO Governance, representing the broader community, allocates resources towards specific, community-prioritized development efforts. This process is owned by the community and operates alongside other development initiatives.

Key points:

• An effort where the targets are selected by FOLIO governance

• FOLIO governance represents wider FOLIO community

• This isn’t to replace current development practices. This is a 3rd avenue that doesn’t currently exist.

The group has been discussing the reasons why this is a good idea, and reaching out to Mike G. about a similar model. Some of the effort is to aggregate conversations that have been happening in the community on this topic.

Alexis: You have this definition. You focus on the community directed development and not Ramsons support. For the timeline, is there enough time to support Ramsons and Okapi?

Jeremy: I hope so that the time frame will match up. It is the goal of the group through the councils through WOLFcon. There are mixed feelings in the group on Ramsons support. Ramsons support would be good for the community.

Alexis: Are there financial resources that we need?

Jeremy: This is where it gets tricky because some of the resources and funding might be included in the community directed development.

20 min

Intro: FOLIO vision statement to help in reviewing priorities.

@Kristin Martin

High level re-framing an older doc: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1fl9WeoFHBzfb3PgivQYOTNCdg3IZCwxLd150Vj1cnvw/edit?tab=t.0

In our previous discussions, we have been talking about how FOLIO fits into the marketplace. A couple of years ago, there was talk about a functional framework for FOLIO. This is meant to be helpful in terms of how we guide development. How do we judge what is important? This document isn’t supposed to be a RFP. User experience is also important. Who’s supposed to use FOLIO? We have a broad audience. A lot of products are specialized. FOLIO doesn’t do this. This document doesn’t want to be too technical. Another question is what is out of scope. Would this document be helpful with the FOLIO elevator speech?

Jeremy: This is interesting. What jumps out are the FOLIO target institutions? There is a complex relationship between a number of resources in FOLIO and what is asked to be in FOLIO. The more broadly that we define who FOLIO is for, the more features will be required for FOLIO. It’s a parabolic relationship between features and resources/target institutions.

Kristin: We haven’t had a clear discussion on or defined who FOLIO is for. We need to examine this more and be more intentional about.

Caitlin: Could we think of it in terms of things we share rather than types of institutions? For example, target institutions share a commitment to open source development, or the ability to customize.

Jeremy: We should target institutions that have development resources.

Caitlin: That can be one consideration. We can’t be everything to everyone. Can we think about what is shared and special? LC has some niche requirements that you can’t get with out of the box LSPs.

Jeremy: This is the sort of intentionallity. Bringing development resources would be huge.

Kristin: In think about the coalition, some things that have proved challenging are when institutions conflict with each other. What are the things that are common? This is in line with the work on Eureka on looking at what is in common.

Harry: The early idea was to have institutions could choose what goes on to that platform. We should get to a point of multiples of functionality/apps. Institutions can pick and choose what is best for them. This doesn’t exist in any other system.

Kristin: It’s good about keeping this vision alive in terms of what we aspire to.

Tod: It’s good to have this conversation. At the international level, there is fragmenting already like with the libraries in Shanghai. At the same time, there is a deep integration of parts of FOLIO that create modularity issues. Where are the universal points of connection.

Caitlin: What are the preconditions are for modules and the marketplace? Why didn’t the marketplace take off?

Harry: For the longest time, we’ve been so focused on a set of libraries up and running. We’ve had blinders on. It’s not easy. We are now just at a point to call FOLIO mature enough to get back to original goals.

Jeremy: The resource lift of multiple installations was a lot higher than many anticipated. Great pains were put into FOLIO architecture to have multiple installations that was never taken advantage of. Are we shutting some of these doors to this architecture?

Harry: There are also governance issues as well. At some point we need to discuss this.

5 min

Future topics

all

https://folio-org.atlassian.net/browse/PCE-11