2025-08-06 Documentation visibility

Date

Aug 6, 2025

Attendees

@Jenn Colt
@Olamide Kolawole
@Maccabee Levine
@Florian Gleixner
@Shelley Doljack
@Wayne Schneider
@Kevin Day
@Tod Olson
@Jeff Gerhard
@Christie Thomas
@Julian Ladisch
@Marc Johnson
@Matt Weaver
@Craig McNally

Time	Item	Who	Notes

Time

Item

Who

Notes

1 min

Scribe

@Florian Gleixner is next, followed by @Ingolf Kuss

Reminder: Please copy/paste the Zoom chat into the notes. If you miss it, this is saved along with the meeting recording, but having it here has benefits.

*

Documentation visibility

ALL

@Shelley Doljack , @Christie Thomas and @Olamide Kolawole have volunteered to care about documentation.

@Olamide Kolawole Open topics: 3 documentation places - developers should have a starting point

@Wayne Schneider Scope of the project? TCs own documentation?

@Jenn Colt More than that

@Shelley Doljack We should start with TCs documentation (Wiki page)

@Christie Thomas Finding documentation could be improved by structuring documentation better

@Shelley Doljack Siedbar could reflect topics from the TC charter

@Tod Olson Focus on audience - these are not only developers

@Marc Johnson What is the goal? Do we want purely organize TC space?

@Shelley Doljack What is the goal, current state and gap?

@Marc Johnson We should set boundaries what documentation should be controlled by the TC

@Christie Thomas We should not set boundaries too tight

@Wayne Schneider Lets start organizing the TC space

@Marc Johnson Lets start moving the “AWS” and “Voting rules” to the archive → done

@Tod Olson Should we organize archive, just by adding something like folders for years

@Christie Thomas we could add a log why we are archiving things

@Wayne Schneider A new Subgroup could decide about this

@Marc Johnson We stepped away from subgroups some weeks before

@Maccabee Levine We did not disallow subgroups, but they did not work well in the past

@Marc Johnson To make subgroups efficient, the scope should be clear

@Jenn Colt and others: Discussion if subgroup should just do the changes or propose changes to the TC.

@Julian Ladisch Let the subgroup just do the changes

@Marc Johnson We could make a decision today, if the subgroup may just do the changes

@Wayne Schneider opposes giving the subgroup a free throw

Subgroup page is filled. Target End date is End of September for the proposal, @Shelley Doljack will be the owner, and will organize the meetings.

NA

Zoom Chat

17:10:39 From Christie Thomas (she/her) To Everyone:
are there other audiences for this documentation? So far we have the TC as an audience and developers as an audience. Who else needs to use this information?

17:11:03 From Wayne Schneider To Everyone:
System Operators

17:11:19 From Jenn Colt To Everyone:
Product owners

17:11:34 From Christie Thomas (she/her) To Everyone:
Organizing by audience is always a good approach.

17:11:45 From Christie Thomas (she/her) To Everyone:
And helps identify gaps in documentation.

17:23:24 From Day, Kevin To Everyone:
It would be great to have the archive page show that mini-guide on what and how to add things to the archive. (Such as adding the date.)
Christie Thomas (she/her):➕

17:24:15 From Florian Gleixner To Everyone:
Archive is one step before delete, i would not try to over-organize it

17:26:00 From Day, Kevin To Everyone:
At least adding the year would make it a little easier to determine when to perform that final delete.

17:26:57 From Olamide Kolawole To Everyone:
I think subgroups should always have a end date.

17:29:11 From Wayne Schneider To Everyone:
@Marc Johnson discussed on 21 July: https://folio-org.atlassian.net/wiki/x/A4DIQg

17:30:04 From Christie Thomas (she/her) To Everyone:
I will be in the documentation subgroup.

17:35:48 From Craig McNally To Everyone:
I think people are overestimating how many people are going to volunteer
Olamide Kolawole:👍

17:36:23 From Craig McNally To Everyone:
It's not a free for all if there's one person doing the work

17:37:22 From Day, Kevin To Everyone:
Replying to "It's not a free for all if there's one person doin...":
I guess it was free for all and only one took up the opportunity?

17:37:54 From Craig McNally To Everyone:
Replying to "It's not a free for all if there's one person doin...":
I missed the part where 3 people volunteered
Day, Kevin:👍

17:39:01 From Christie Thomas (she/her) To Everyone:
End of September seems generous and doable to me.

Topic Backlog
Decision Log Review	All	Review decisions that are in progress. Can any of them be accepted? rejected?
Translation Subgroup	All	Since we're having trouble finding volunteers for a subgroup, maybe we can make progress during a dedicated discussion session?
Communicating Breaking Changes	All	Currently there is a PoC, developed by @Maccabee Levine, of a utility to catalog Github PRs that have been labeled with the "breaking change" label. We would like to get developer feedback on the feasibility of this label being used more often, and the usefulness of this utility.
Officially Supported Technologies - Upkeep	All	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.
Dev Documentation Visibility	All	Possible topic/activity for a Wednesday session: Discuss/brainstorm: Ideas for the type of developer-facing documentation we think would be most helpful for new developers How we might bring existing documentation up to date and ensure it's consistent etc.
API linting within our backend modules	All	https://folio-project.slack.com/archives/CAQ7L02PP/p1713343461518409 Hello team, I would like to discuss API linting within our backend modules. Some time ago, we transitioned our linting process from Jenkins to GitHub Actions as outlined in https://folio-org.atlassian.net/browse/FOLIO-3678. I am assuming that this move was done via some technical council decision. Please correct me if I'm wrong. In my observations, I've found two problems: Schema linting does not occur if the schemas are in YAML format. There are issues with resolving some deeper references during API linting. Although I'm unsure about how to improve the existing linting implementations within Folio, I propose to consider an open-source solution that handles OpenAPI linting effectively and allows us to define custom rules. For your reference: https://stoplight.io/open-source/spectral A test of this solution can be found in this PR: https://github.com/folio-org/mod-search/pull/567. The same PR also provides an example of custom rule definition: https://github.com/folio-org/mod-search/pull/567/files#diff-d5da7cb43c444434994b76f3b04aa6e702c09e938de09dbc09d72569d611d9ab.Also, by employing 'Spectral', I discovered AsyncAPI (https://www.asyncapi.com/en), an API design tool similar to OpenAPI but for asynchronous interactions. I suggest that we consider using AsyncAPI in FOLIO to generate documentation for Kafka interactions.
PR Templates	All	https://folio-project.slack.com/archives/CAQ7L02PP/p1713445649504769 Hello team, Small request to consider. Regarding pr templates. From my perspective, pr template is not good idea. Even the biggest open source projects that are contributed by many people don't have any pr template. Currently what we have for acq modules https://github.com/folio-org/mod-orders-storage/blob/master/PULL_REQUEST_TEMPLATE.md These pr template is inconsistent in different teams. What I suggest is that, pr template shouldn't be any instructions, because most developer who are creating pr have already understand the rules. If we put just two section into template, it will encourage developers to write more about their work and that lead to knowledge sharing among developers.
Proposed Mod Kafka	All	https://folio-project.slack.com/archives/CAQ7L02PP/p1714471592534689 Mike Taylor Proposal. If and only if a FOLIO instance is running Kafka, it should insert and enable a module called mod-kafka, which consists entirely of a module descriptor that says it provides the interface kafka. The purpose is so that other modules can use the standard <IfInterface> and similar tools to determine whether they should attempt Kafka operations. Rationale: the FOLIO ILS depends absolutely on Kafka, but other uses of the platform will not. One such example: a dev platform that includes only mod-users, used as a source of change events for Metadb.