2024-09-27 Community Council Meeting Minutes (in-person)

Developer Advocate Role extension

@Simeon Warner

• It is too early to already see the results of Patricks work.

  • How do we find out what is his focused output

• Poll: vote to continue through the fiscal year (at least 3 months)

• 3 month: 4.500 $

• Extension for 1 year for a sustainable continuation of his work: $ 36,000

• Extension through June 2025: agreed with 6 votes in person → will be send out to the absend members

  • ACTION - Simeon to ratify with absent CC members via Slack

• What are the goals we want to achieve with this engagement?

  • Ask the dev teams, including EPAM (e.g. Kitfox)

  • See Google Doc “Responsibility” for his tasks

  • Community doesn't have an overview of non-EPAM development → old list is long outdated

  • Can Patrick (with the help of the members) put together a recent overview of this?

  • Action for Simeon: extend contract, ask TC about their thoughts, reach out to Mike as well

  • Discussion about: what do we want to finance with the members money?

  • Responsibilities will have clear measurements for success.

AWS costs

@Simeon Warner

Simeon’s thoughts on AWS:

• Historically, FOLIO has paid for AWS for some dev teams (including EBSCO/EPAM and TAMU) and EBSCO has provided significant technical support funding in addition to their membership that has offset a significant portion of this. FY25 projections starkly changed this situations both with planned reduced contributions and unexpected AWS cost increases:

• --- FY22: AWS: $107,777, EBSCO: $ 79,500 (74%) ($31,300 of this actually booked in FY23)

• --- FY23: AWS: $228,441, EBSCO: $109,000 (48%)

• --- FY24: AWS: $230,118, EBSCO: $109,000 (47%)

• --- FY25: AWS: $460,000, EBSCO: $ 30,000 (7%) (August 2024 projections!!!!)

• --- Per 2024-09-09 CC meeting, AWS spending temporarily capped at $30k/month ($360k/year)

• There was no forewarning of the huge increase in projected AWS costs from FY24 to FY25. The change is due to a a combination of ramp-up in the number of environments needed to support development for both Okapi and Eureka environments, and increased testing work.

• There was limited community process around the decision to go to Eureka. There was no awareness of or planning around cost changes associated with Eureka. Eureka is primarily driven by EBSCO's need to meet the requirements of the LC implementation project.

• There is broad community support for Eureka as a good long-term direction for FOLIO, and thus EBSCO's work on Eureka is of significant benefit to the community. There are, however, some community concerns about the timing of Eureka and how to manage/reduce the time that both Okapi and Eureka need to be supported.

• Long-term, I (Simeon) think that the cost of development environments specific to dev teams should be paid for by the same mechanism that pays for the team. This is already the case for development work done by Index Data, K-Int, German libraries. This is the only scalable path -- in the current model the FOLIO community is suddenly on the hook to pay for additional effort that may be unconnected with increased membership.

  • The FOLIO community should pay for key shared services such as integration testing, UAT and CI/CD.

DIscussion

• What is EBSCOs thinking?

  • $60000 is given by EBSCO right now ($30000 membership and additional $30.000) → last year $109.000

  • Downtrim because of

    • EBSCO was focused on cost control and corrections

    • 15.4 mill was spend on FOLIO with LOC (last year 12 mill)

    • Contained a lot of feature development

    • All shared services → funded by community

    • development → funded by its “stakeholders”

• Agreement on Simeon's proposal in general

  • right now a possible way forward

  • We need am idea about the membership / community “story” and purpose

• What about shared development if brought to the community? Should be possible as well

• Model would mean: AWS invoices would go to the “stakeholders” (here EBSCO) directly

• FOLIO has a limited available capacity for administration

• Are we creating a risk of forking?

• The of test enviroments might change with EUREKA in place and the new app formalization → just a small portion is needed in test env. scope

• LOC development will decrease in future: go live is more or less reached

• Do we need a transition plan?

• What do we want to message out?

• The cost increase is for the EUREKA test and UAT environment

  • community would fund for shared infrastructure, like UAT but not individual development env.

  • Okapi is still included in the community funding for this fiscal year

• Moving forward, we propose to adopt these principles: 

  • the community funds truly shared infrastructure including CI/CD, UAT and end-to-end testing environments

  • development teams fund their individual dev/test environments

  • cost sharing for any significant changes in spending or direction can be joint funded, subject to advance discussion, mutual agreement, planning and budgeting

  • see draft letter from CC

• Vote on this proposal in person: 5x yes, 1x abstain -we will send this out to the absent members

  • ACTION - Simeon to ratify with rest of CC via Slack

Member Meeting Review

@Christopher Spalding

• Do we want to formalize these meetings?

• How often?

• Approach (agenda, forum, unconference)

Discussion:

• there was strong feedback for f2f meetings

• need for meetings and explanations

• explain membership in addition to community

• idea:

  • 4x / year open community meetings

  • 2x / year: members meeting

    • manage expections, provide leadership, collect feedback

  • Members are much more than councils

    • include the membership in the processes

    • councils are more the “executuve bodys”

• Meeting organization

  • Agree to some rules (speaking time, etc.)

  • Agree on how the agenda is set up

  • Concentrate on certain topics

  • Preparation of this meeting is a responsible task

    • Senseful agenda

    • Concentrate on 1-2 main topics to discuss to results

    • Manage communication

    • Follow up results

• Who owns the MM?

  • Slack channel

• What do we want to achieve?

  • Defintion of roles to particpate in MMs → Management level

  • Ensure transparency but be effective as well

• Other thoughts

  • Discussion around “benefits” is a critical questions

  • We do expect people to engage!

  • Tell a different story! Don’t expect “benefits” but engage in a culture and in the project

  • Membership is money but very important as well is taking up responsible roles and engagement

  • Goal: planned engagement and fundraising

  • Goal: new members but as well get existing members into engagment and taking roles and engagement in the community

• Next steps

  • Ask for next agenda items

  • Develop a concept to reach out to members

    • idea: engage / invest by level of enablement

• Proposal: half a day meeting of CC to concentrate on how to organize MM

  • Action item: organize this! who?

  • Smaller working groups from the councils before the F2F to organize the agenda

• Action item: organize a F2F CC meeting focussing on membership to develop a formal and organized process

• → Continue discuss of way forward at 2024-10-14 Community Council Meeting Minutes

TBD, see list above