2022-11-03 Meeting notes

Recording

https://recordings.openlibraryfoundation.org/folio/product-council/2022-11-03T09:30/

Attendees

Discussion items

TimeItemWhoNotes
5 min

Announcements

  • Onboarding Group getting going
  • BugFest starting: We are planning to run FOLIO Bug Fest for Nolana release R3 2022 from November 7th to November 18th.
  • FOLIO China updates
All

Planning on having the first go-around ready near Christmas and start the pilot next year. How do we put our needs in front of new members in a way that is welcoming and expresses the needs of the project? The idea is to have a slide deck that anyone can use to onboard or mentor a new organization to the community.

There has been a response from the community about the need for the documentation coordinator, and outreach continues for that.

Bugfest is starting on November 7th and runs until November 18th.  There are test cases that need to be claiming. Reach out to Anton to get set up in Test Rails.  (There are a limited number of TestRail accounts, so people that have done it previously but not recently may need to be set up again.) Also add your name to FOLIO Testing Community Members.

Two new libraries added to the China FOLIO community.


SIG Conversations


Conversations are continuing to happen.  Kristin noted several themes that have come out, and she has added them to her notes on conversations.

Next step: look to pull out general themes from the notes documents.

There are frustrations coming from the Metadata Management SIG, which seems related to the lack of development capacity to build to the specifications they are developing. The MM SIG has been an early warning indicator of issues that later affect live sites. The aim is to provide places where new organizations can come in and make an impact on the project. There was an extensive discussion of how resources in the project are allocated and what can be done to influence that allocation.


Community Council feedback:

From Tom Cramer on Slack:

Since September, the CC, PC and TC have canvassed many community members on “what are things that could be better about FOLIO?” This came out of discussions at WOLFcon in Hamburg about what the priorities were for advancing & investing the project. 20+ council members interviewed 60+ informants from the community, producing a list of 175 items. These items can be found in a grouped list that sorts the input into 13 different categories. This is a rich gauge of where many community members find the project--I recommend reading through this doc all at once to capture the gestalt. (~15 min)A synthesis of all the input can be found in this presentation. The last three slides contain some specific and actionable opportunities for the FOLIO councils to consider and adopt as priority items around which to organize community effort.


Community Council has not yet had a chance to talk about this; the Tech Council did discuss at its meeting yesterday.

It is easier to prioritize as a small group, and—if that group has development resources—to move the activity forward.

In potential-action-items-1, there is an item for "attention on growing the community through marketing, supporting adoption, onboarding" which is related to the discussion of the onboarding group from earlier in the meeting.

There is a discussion in the chat about the ARLEF (Academic Research Library Exchange on FOLIO) group. Can this be an agenda item for a future product council meeting? The group was formed in part as a response to the resourcing discussion that has been happening in the community.

On the developer topic, if more contributions are desired then there needs to be a cohesion of design. The "flower release" is the locus of control at the moment; if that changes, then the nature of how development teams contribute effort will change as well. This also ties into concerns about how to scale the project in keeping with the vision of a platform for library apps.

5 min

Agenda Topics:

  • Roadmap/prioritization deferred to next week
  • Functional Criteria for new FOLIO modules

Next week is a SIG update week (template), and Kristin Martin with talk with Jesse Koennecke about whether the roadmap/prioritization work is ready for presentation.

Review our development process where an institution has given a developer that has worked successfully. What can be learned from that?

Chat logs

00:08:40	Martina Schildt | VZG:	I have internet issues - no camera today
00:12:51	Kristin Martin:	Newbie like me?  Here's what to do:
Contact 
@anton_e
 to get a TestRails account
Add your name to https://wiki.folio.org/display/FTC/FOLIO+Testing+Community+Members
Join # bug-fest; 
@Julie Bickle (LMU)
 and I can get you access, so too can others I'm sure
00:14:32	Tod Olson:	Good news, congratulations!
00:14:46	Tiewei Liu:	😃
00:17:53	Kristin Martin:	https://docs.google.com/document/d/1GqtRaEbrt-IiEyEDQXJBcBqdA_QjOwcDtEL47aqztpk/edit
00:29:07	Alexis Manheim:	Is it that there are just a lot of needs coming out of the Metadata group? Is there a dev team assigned to Metadata Mgmt?
00:29:55	Marc Johnson:	There is no single team assigned to metadata management
00:30:13	Tod Olson:	✔️
00:30:20	Ian Walls:	Library metadata is.... historically quite complicated, and it can be difficult to translate the domain knowledge into something that software developers can work with
00:30:37	Marc Johnson:	Rather multiple teams work actively in this area, including teams dedicated to some of the areas that Charlotte mentioned e.g. FoliJet predominantly work on data import
00:31:11	Marc Johnson:	This is where the framing of a lack of development capacity is interesting, as overall, it likely has more than many others areas
00:34:05	Maura Byrne:	BRB
00:37:22	Maura Byrne:	back
00:38:10	Marc Johnson:	This is the list of teams: https://wiki.folio.org/display/REL/Team+vs+module+responsibility+matrix
00:39:10	Kristin Martin:	https://wiki.folio.org/display/FOLIJET/Folio+Development+Teams+Home
00:39:28	Marc Johnson:	I wasn’t trying to suggest it was purely about money.

I was trying to say you need to influence the folks who are paying the money.
00:40:00	Charlotte Whitt:	Yes, that list Is better, Kristin M. Here you can see who, and how many developers each of the development team has.
00:43:50	Marc Johnson:	That list on the folio development home page is significantly out of date
00:44:17	Kristin Martin:	What is the best list to reference at this point?
00:44:42	Marc Johnson:	I don’t think we have an authoritative source
00:44:52	Marc Johnson:	The module responsibility list is actively maintained
00:45:21	Marc Johnson:	It is unlikely to be complete
00:47:36	Owen Stephens:	And ultimately we have to decide - is that really more important than everything else
00:48:01	Owen Stephens:	Because deciding to spend that amount of time on something that already works but imperfectly is a big thing
00:48:50	Ian Walls:	the barrier here is the high level of specialization required to develop on FOLIO.  If we could lower that barrier, then instead of trying to influence the priorities of dev teams to match our own, we could just make the change we want to see
00:51:05	Aaron Trehub:	Madder?
00:51:08	Owen Stephens:	It’s a subtle hint to something that could be better about Folio? More colour
00:51:11	Owen Stephens:	Or color
00:51:14	Maura Byrne:	Puce!
00:51:18	Ian Walls:	is the coloration really that important?
00:51:42	Marc Johnson:	The TC did discuss them yesterday
00:51:57	Tod Olson:	"While the official color of Stanford is cardinal, the color gold was originally selected as Stanford’s official color and was adopted by Stanford’s student body in fall 1891, just after the university opened."
00:52:06	Alexis Manheim:	Cardinal!
00:52:10	Alexis Manheim:	thanks, Tod
00:52:12	Kirstin Kemner-Heek:	Sorry!
00:53:04	Tod Olson:	Though it looks like gold and blue were a contender once upon a time.
00:54:51	Aaron Trehub:	To return to the previous topic: insufficient development resources and/or ineffective onboarding and allocation of (esp. community) development resources are long-standing problems in FOLIO. The recently formed ARLEF group is trying to address it. See the ARLEF Charter at https://wiki.folio.org/display/ARLEF/ARLEF+Charter. Wish us luck.
00:56:43	Ian Walls:	also, developers are to not interchangeable cogs
00:56:43	Marc Johnson:	I didn’t know about that group.

Are they associated with a council? If not, how do they fit with the rest of the community?
00:58:03	Karen Newbery:	ARLEF is not associated with a council, but is made up of R1 institutions who are members of the FOLIO community.
00:59:28	Tod Olson:	ARLEF isn't really associated with a council, unless possibly CC. I think of it as something of an affinity group, trying to find ways to pool resources to address issues of common concern.
00:59:50	Marc Johnson:	Isn’t that the definition of the community as a whole too?
01:00:15	Marc Johnson:	Isn’t FOLIO about pooling resources to address common needs?
01:00:22	Peter Murray:	(If you see my video bouncing, it is because there is a cat batting at my video monitor.)
01:00:43	Karen Newbery:	Sure, makes sense
01:02:53	Marc Johnson:	Going back to the developer topic. If folks are thinking of wanting many more contributors, the community needs to figure out how to achieve cohesion of design (which is already a challenge today)
01:03:06	Tod Olson:	++
01:06:19	Marc Johnson:	Those parameters apply at the app / module level
01:06:30	Marc Johnson:	Many contributions happen below that level
01:08:53	Marc Johnson:	The current parameters don’t really do much about cohesion of design beyond some basic fundamentals (mixed with some historical constraints)
01:15:16	Tod Olson:	++Marc
01:18:46	Charlotte Whitt:	I think it is a great slide deck you have put together
01:21:59	Owen Stephens:	The ERM dev team has traditionally been made up of developers from a number of institutions/orgs
01:22:12	Brooks Travis:	Best example is probably Mark Deutsch(sp?) from Duke?
01:22:22	Owen Stephens:	But that’s shrunk over time
01:22:32	Aaron Trehub:	UAlabama has apparently contributed locally developed calendar code successfully.
01:22:41	Karen Newbery:	Spelling is correct of Deutsch.
01:22:55	Brooks Travis:	Yes!!
01:22:56	Peter Murray:	Oh, yes...good point Aaron.
01:23:41	Aaron Trehub:	And we heard at WOLFcon that Texas A&M has developed a local workflow engine.
01:24:09	Marc Johnson:	What bound with work is Maccabee doing?
01:24:55	Charlotte Whitt:	Ui-calendar was done by the Bama team (at Alabama)
01:24:57	Peter Murray:	Template for SIG updates for next week: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1268qg6EoxMwgqnmQkgeUycZkZJQs-No4rJr5xizvamw/edit#
01:24:59	Brooks Travis:	apologies, but I need to jump a couple minutes early
01:26:49	Brooks Travis:	Do we have a good overview of what bound with work us being done there? I’m not sure I’m aware of the specifics.
01:27:05	Kirstin Kemner-Heek:	Yes
01:27:46	Brooks Travis:	Ok. That work I’m aware of. Thought there might have been something else.
01:29:36	Kristin Martin:	I think some of what we are looking for is examples that we can build out as a process.
01:29:47	Maura Byrne:	+1 Kristin
01:29:47	Owen Stephens:	I’m afraid I need to leave a couple of minutes early.
01:29:58	Sharon Wiles-Young:	+1 Kristin