2023-03-23 Product Council Meeting notes
Date
Attendees
- Alexis Manheim, Brooks Travis, Carol Sterenberg, Charlotte Whitt, Debra Howell, Gang Zhou, Hkaplanian, Ian Walls, Jana Freytag, Jenn Colt, Jesse Koennecke, Karen Newbery, Kristin Martin, Marc Johnson, Martina Schildt, Martina Tumulla, Maura Byrne, Owen Stephens, Peter Murray, Sharon Wiles-Young, twliu
Recording
https://recordings.openlibraryfoundation.org/folio/product-council/2023-03-23T09:30/
Discussion items
| Time | Item | Who | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| 5 min | Announcements
| All | Sharon Wiles-Young is retiring from Lehigh this spring. Paul Moeller will be taking over her term (until July 2023). The FOLIO Terminology Draft was approved in the Product Council vote. The thought was to put this on the docs.folio.org site, and responsibility for editing would fall to the documentation group unless there are major changes that are needed in the future. The Onboarding group did a trial run-through of the presentation with staff from Stanford. The group got some good feedback about improving it. |
| 50 min | Roadmap and Prioritization Group updates | Reviewed the previous roadmap themes and associated issues in Jira to update the current state of work (document). The themes were sized differently, which made it difficult to understand progress. Areas with multiple POs are reflected differently from areas with one PO. Not all of the work in Jira is on the Roadmap. Most of the themes had some progress. Themes tied to Jira issues were helpful in evaluating progress. Articulating priorities and having them on a roadmap was useful. Considerations for a new roadmap:
Next steps:
This process is key in many respects: there are organizations with resources that are asking for ways to help the project, and the roadmap is key to how the PC fulfills its charter. It isn't always clear why teams are working on what they are working on, and hopefully the roadmap process can improve that communication with the SIGs. In judging the size of roadmap items, somewhere there is a split between the roadmap item and the feature-level details in Jira. Can some parts of the roadmap link to product owner dashboards in Jira? (So the roadmap represents what is going on in addition to what is desired?) How different SIGs and development teams think of the theme-epic-feature level of detail is different and changing, too. Next steps might be getting members of the community to expand areas of roadmap where there isn't a lot of detail right now. Having the specifications ready is sometimes all that is needed to get work started. This raises the need to have more product owners. | |
| 30 | Council Updates | Community Council: Jenn Colt presented changes to the TC charter that were approved. There were multiple discussions of funding for the FOLIO project, including AWS hosting costs for testing at scale. This year we did not receive the AWS credits that we had received in previous years (approximately US$60,000). Boaz has started a group to look at marketing FOLIO. Discussions about planning for WOLFcon later this year. Discussions about the elections process for this year. A resourcing working group is starting again with a new charter. Technical Council: TC is part-way through a regular review of the module review process; there will be a presentation to PC, the SIGs, and others about changes to this process and how this process works. TC started reviewing the terminology draft this week; the TC will likely have more feedback for the document authors. An RFC went into public review about how Kafka will be used in the infrastructure; this will have significant impacts on FOLIO operators. There is an RFC in draft about how developers can tell FOLIO operators about significant changes to the environment; the project isn't consistent when describing which changes are significant or not. The TC is reviewing a process about governance for getting new AWS resources; this will likely be a cross-council process with CC. Changes that impacted database performance were retroactively approved by the TC, and this will be talked about how to get this rolled out to more areas of the code. The working group reviewing the translation modules has concluded that the TC is not in a position to reasonably evaluate the modules because of the changes required to the underlying code. Release Planning: Tara Barnett is working with Oleksii Petrenko to create the Release Digest for FOLIO releases, starting with Orchid. There are likely different audiences between the notes needed for FOLIO operators and the release digest. Product Owners | |
| New/upcoming topics | Sharon Beltaine is working with a small group on reporting options as a topic for an April or May meeting. Recruiting people into the PO roles, including revamping the pages on the wiki. The "PO assistant" role might be useful for system analysts at libraries. |
Chat log
00:06:16 Owen Stephens: Thanks for those who worked on this 00:09:15 Marc Johnson: I’ll convey the extra information about the definitions documentation. It might change the nature of our feedback, if it’s likely to be harder to iterate on in the future 00:13:05 Owen Stephens: It might be sensible to split the documentation between the generally static and generally dynamic aspects. Specifically it strikes me that the information under “There are some more specific uses of the term platform†in the document could change easily (and at the moment mentions only one (platform minimal) of several definitions of this type (platform complete, platform erm, etc.) 00:14:26 Marc Johnson: Reacted to "It might be sensible…" with 👠00:14:38 Harry: Should we wait to ask questions/comments? 00:15:02 Jesse Koennecke (he/him): Yes, lets do questions/comments after the slides. 00:15:10 Kristin Martin: Please, we have two spots for questions. 00:15:11 Harry: Reacted to "Yes, lets do questio..." with 👠00:21:35 Peter Murray: https://support.airtable.com/docs/nonprofit-and-educational-plans-faqs 00:25:59 Marc Johnson: The teams aren’t usually making the decisions on what to work on 00:25:59 Harry: I agree 00:36:57 Marc Johnson: It could be worth keeping in mind the CC has a working group for changing the governance structures around development teams and capacity 00:39:22 Brooks Travis: More likely to have one-time funding than FTE 00:40:03 Brooks Travis: This raises the importance of having more POs, as well 00:40:11 Maura Byrne: Reacted to "This raises the impo..." with 👠00:41:12 Harry: Great point Jenn! 00:43:17 Karen Newbery: https://wiki.folio.org/display/PO/Product+Owners%3A+Available+positions 00:45:05 Brooks Travis: It can look/be overwhelming 00:45:39 Brooks Travis: That’s been some of the conversation around how to expand PO capacity 00:46:24 Brooks Travis: The analyst/assistant PO role 00:50:58 Brooks Travis: I will be stepping away at the :30 mark of the hour. Thanks for this conversation, and all the hard work of the groups working on the roadmap and feature prioritization efforts. 00:51:32 Brooks Travis: +1 Maura 00:58:26 Harry: I need to jump off everyone. Thank you. Great call today! 00:59:54 Charlotte Whitt: Are you referring to mod-consortia and ui-consortia, Marc? 01:01:27 Brooks Travis: Adieu, folks. Thanks, again. Have a great rest of your week. 01:04:50 Owen Stephens: Which means that they cannot be included in the Flower releases 01:05:24 Marc Johnson: Replying to "Are you referring to…" I was referring to mod-translations and ui-translations 01:05:47 Marc Johnson: Replying to "Are you referring to…" I’m not aware of any submission of the consortia modules 01:05:57 Owen Stephens: That means we cannot achieve (through this route) the support for a multi-lingual interface that the PC previously supported 01:06:13 Owen Stephens: Or indicated it supported 01:06:23 Marc Johnson: Not at this time, yes. 01:06:33 Marc Johnson: We would need to agree on the underlying approach first 01:11:35 Marc Johnson: If we go that way, we need to understand and accept the impedance mismatch between the PC and TC processes 01:12:58 Owen Stephens: I have to step away for 10 minutes or so - apologies 01:14:26 Jana Freytag | VZG: The RA SIG have had a PO assistance group which gave SMEs an understanding on how POs work and some took over some fleshing out of issues. 01:15:24 Kristin Martin: Our notes are here: https://wiki.folio.org/display/PC/2023-02-23+Product+Council+Meeting+Notes 01:16:00 Carol Sterenberg: Thank you!