2023-09-27 Product Council P&R Working Group Meeting Notes

The Working Group reviewed the Proof-of-concept spreadsheet of modules to apps, with the addition of suggested SIG responsibility and funding provider for the app. Some potential issues noted:

• Working Groups are not necessarily the same as SIG. Working groups are usually formed to address a detailed and complicated development area and may be under a SIG or be cross-SIG. The Working Group is generally run entirely by a PO seeking feedback who has responsibility to run the meetings and the authority to start or stop the group at will.
• Too many working group can put too much of a burden on an individual SIG convener, who may not know or have the expertise in all working group areas, disrupting the connection from the SIG to the PC, and potentially causing issues in development to be overlooked.

What is the purpose of SIGS?

• From wiki: "Special Interest Group (SIG) consists of practitioners from libraries and services providers that are interested in contributing to a specific functional area of the FOLIO platform.
• SIGs provide feedback to POs on new development
• SIGs provide user-to-user support
• SIGs also suffer from an identity crisis: we casually use the terminology "subject matter expert" (SME) for SIG members but most members do not fulfill the full role as defined in Agile because they are not part of acceptance testing and "closing the loop on development." This is another way that development work can diverge from SIG expectations, because this work isn't shared.

Some additional questions about SIGs?

• Should every app have a SIG association?
• How do we represent work on the roadmap that is being done outside of the SIGs and main project, but is required for specific FOLIO clients?
  • Related: how can we harmonize desires by SIG members with requirements from organizations implementing FOLIO and paying for its development?
• What is the role of the SysOps SIG? Does it have any apps under its purview?

Ideas for SIGs:

• Review apps to make sure SIGs are properly scoped
• Review working groups to see which should be turned into SIGs and have conveners independent of the POs
• Have SIG members write up the Test Rails accounts and be more actively involved in testing
• SIG convener could help with Roadmap review of key areas for development (or review what funding providers share)
• Looking at other projects: archivesspace's prioritization wiki page. https://archivesspace.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/AC/pages/38502430/Development+Prioritization+Sub-Team ASpace is simpler than FOLIO but perhaps we can see an ASpace:FOLIO app relationship where one expectation of a sig convener is that they spend 1 to 1.5 hours per month going through feature suggestions from their sig - deduplicating them against JIRA and then passing them to the relevant PO for review.