2025-04-14 Meeting notes

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.

Maccabee Levine

Tod Olson

Jakub Skoczen

Craig McNally

• CC:  Maccabee Levine: 

  • I shared the "TC Wolfcon 2025 brainstorming" doc, explained (some of) these topics would need participation from CC (and PC) since the issues are more in their domains. 

  • CC introduced a new lower-cost "Friends of FOLIO" contribution option for more fundraising. Membership subgroup is separately working on better articulating the value of FOLIO memberhsip, for view in a few weeks. Several libraries looking for reasons to pay more. 

    • CC also working on a draft letter to send to new customers / potential community members.  Comments open until Friday.

  • Drafted a vision statement for the website

    • The Future Of Libraries Is Open
      Community as Vision: The FOLIO community is open to all. Consisting of libraries, developers, vendors, consortia, and networks, we work together to build and maintain an open source library services platform that enables innovation and delivers both traditional and new resource management capabilities to libraries across the world.
      Product as Mission: (Guide/influence/govern/whatever)The community directs the development of FOLIO as an open source platform for libraries that provides choice and protection from vendor lock-in. Its modular, adaptable architecture provides a stable platform to meet current needs while being forward-thinking, empowering libraries to lead innovation, respond to change, and shape their digital futures.

    • Discussion about various aspects. Re "The community directs the development of FOLIO", folks agreed this is not the current reality, but some wanted it there as an aspirational statement, others did not even think it should be an aspiration. I brought up the governance guiding principles (about community, and also about local decision making authority) and asked CC for further clarity on this to inform TC, i.e. whether we should be aspiration or current-reality-based, and what those aspirations are.

    • People should leave comments on a Google Doc, and CC will discuss again at next meeting.

  • Line item contributions via EBSCO and IndexData hosting.

  • Election voting will be open to people who have logged into FOLIO's Jira/Confluence since the cloud migration.  Not based on Slack usage, since Slack workspace is scoped to OLF not FOLIO.
  • Community support for FOLIO infrastructure.  What infrastructure should be community supported, as opposed to a requirement for whoever supports dev team(s) etc.  Earlier discussions were inconclusive.  Committee needs more voices on this, Mike G. will participate.  Others should as well, active attention is important.
• PC: Tod Olson:
  • Wolfcon session
  • Bugfest is slow and may impact release date
• RMS Group: Jakub Skoczen: 
• Security Team: Craig McNally:
  • no news
• Eureka Early Adopters:  Craig McNally:
  • Latest status updates can be found here , spreadsheet there is up-to-date
  • Significant GBV progress

• 16 Apr 2025 - Dedicated Discussion - FQM RFC
• 21 Apr 2025 - Regular meeting
• 23 Apr 2025 - Dedicated Discussion - TBD
• 25 Apr 2025 - Folio Community Update - Craig McNally and Jenn Colt to prep
• 28 Apr 2025 - Regular meeting
• Dedicated Discussion Topics:
  • Developer Advocate
  • Evaluating existing modules
  • Communication plan to promote updates to OST pages
    • Need to update OST pages with communication plan changes
    • Need a retro on changes to OST(?)
  • TC Roles and Responsibilities
  • FQM RFC
  • WOLFcon Planning
  • OST discussion around the Grails 7 and Java 17 issues; get to talk to the stakeholders

2 open PRs...

• https://github.com/folio-org/tech-council/pull/80 (TCR-43)
  • Deferred, capture that it was withdrawn and then merge
  • Questions about what do WRT merging when something  is deferred, rejected. Not outlined in the documentation what to do with the PRs.
  • Jira workflow doesn't work well for deferred to withdrawn/canceled status
  • Jenn Colt will try again to get the right image in
• https://github.com/folio-org/tech-council/pull/69 (TCR-39)
  • Ready to merge

All

• Craig McNally asked for volunteers to help update the RFC process documentation and update the existing RFCs to include stub entries. None were forthcoming
  • Still need to do this
• Craig McNally will reach out to RFC proposer to create stub wiki pages that refer to the github RFCs
  • Still need to do this

Notes:

• FQM vote on Wednesday - what is the meaning of the vote - do we consider implications or just review based on the RFC itself?
• Consider impacts of non-acceptance?
  • Removal vs documentation vs special nature of FQM
    • Can change text in RFC
    • Other module wanting special privileges could be a separate vote when it comes up
  • How much does the scope of our 'power' matter? Can we address concerns with this at all?
  • Mixing together RFC and module processes by mistake? RFC is an independent process voting on an architectural design choice
  • If this is just about documentation we didn't need to do this whole process
  • RFC gives TC an opportunity to discuss the architectural changes
  • Is this a bookkeeping exercise or does it have impact?
  • TC has power to make architectural decisions but there are practical limitations
  • Do we need to know impacts before voting?
  • Schema issue is an architectural change being done here
  • there was a conditional acceptance because we needed it but we still needed to know how it worked. so this is documentation in the sense of backfilling what should have been there originally
  • documentation reflects current state, way of completing the RFC/acceptance

Craig McNally asked about whether we could update the calendar page. Marc Johnson advised that we are waiting for a Trillium timeline. Craig McNally will follow up with Oleksii Petrenko about when the schedule might be published

Draft Trillium timeline is available:  https://folio-org.atlassian.net/wiki/x/BIAqNg

To Do:

• Updated Recurring Calendar page dates and document statuses

Does the TC want to run any sessions this year?

Previous Notes:

• WolfCon ideas are needed and a Google document is being created to collect the ideas.
• Brainstorming Ideas suggested thus far:
  • A Eureka update as TC sponsored sessions, even if the work primarily comes out of EBSCO.
  • A session on technical debt.
  • Is the Early Adopters Group posting something, find out and consider sponsoring a session.
  • Privacy Issues session.
  • Market Place Workshop or Variety of Platforms Workshop (What we think running a Market Place would look like, from a governance perspective).
  • A "Firefly Presentation".
• We might just be working with the PC for sessions or workshops.
• Whether or not we need a dedicated meeting for WolfCon will depend on the Google document.
  • It seems unlikely that we will need another meeting and the discussions may be happened asynchronously on the document or on Slack.

Review decisions that are in progress.  Can any of them be accepted?  rejected?

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. 

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.

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.