2023-05-10 Meeting notes

Date

Attendees 

Regrets: Florian Gleixner 

Discussion items

TimeItemWhoNotes
1 minScribeAll

Tod Olson is next, followed by Jakub Skoczen 

10 minutes maxTCR Board Review

All

N.B. Deadline for Poppy is .  TCRs submitted after  (prior to the TC meeting) may not be completed in time.

  • TCR-25 (ui-consortia_settings)
  • TCR-26 (mod-consortia-settings)

Today:

  • Make final decisions on these 
  • Update: ui-consortia-settings  does allow to update information
  • Vote to accept ui-consortia-settings 
  • Decision: both ui-consortia-settings and mod-consortia-settings are accepted
5 minCC / PC Updates

Any updates from the PC and/or CC?

  • CC: No CC meeting the week of 5/8.
  • PC: governance discussion,
    • talking about how to get more involvement for people in PO roles, but there are limits on time people can contribute
    • let to discussion of how work is planned, and who plans work
    • How can the project have small units of work that people can pick up?
    • Can there be a person who can coordinate small units of work? maybe someone with dev background and could include devs with small unites of time
    • Anecdote from Zak:
      • Talk by Richard Stallman: for a large, mature project, effort of organizing small amounts of work outweighs the benefits gains for such a large codebase
      • Marc tried to give similar feedback, but PC would like to try
      • J. Huff: some areas have lower barriers to entry, so might be able to outline specific places where piecemeal development could be useful
    • Expect PC to discuss further in the future
    • See 2023-05-04 Product Council Meeting notes for details
1 minElectionsAll
  • Nomination window has ended
  • We have 7 nominations for 5 open spots.
  • Unclear when voting will start/end
1 minWOLFcon planning

From slack:

Hi TC, it's  WOLFcon planning time.  I volunteered to wrangle together the technical FOLIO session proposals.  The OLF folks want a draft list of session ideas by the first week of June, so less than one month from now.  You can see last year's FOLIO sessions here.  So, what technical sessions should we have this year?

      • If you're willing to coordinate a particular session -- presentation, or panel discussion, or whatever -- please fill out the form.
      • If you have an idea for a technical session but want to discuss it first...I guess let's do that in a thread here?  I assume @cmcnally doesn't want to fill up the next month of TC meetings more than necessary.

Notes:
  • Let's discuss in slack.  If needed we can discuss at a later TC meeting (or possibly a Monday session)
  • Maccabee Levine planning to request suggestions in #development and #stripes as well – same as in #tech-council, either to fill out the form or discuss in a thread.  ok?
5-10 min

Technical Council Sub Groups Updates

All

Java 17 RFCs: have set up channel to discuss, trying to get traction async

Distributed vs Central Config: difficulty getting started

Onboarding Documentation:

  • Doc SIG considers this out of their scope, but can be involved
  • Feedback on onboarding index: incoming developers have not been aware of this
  • Postpone actions on updating until after budget
  • Ready to move this to historical groups
5 minUpcoming meetings
  • TC dedicated discussion:   11:00 AM ET
    • ?

N.B.  Check your profile settings to ensure the timezone is configured appropriately.  Events in the TC calendar will have incorrect times if your not configured correctly.

5-10 minRFCsAll

Breaking Changes: in public review

Java 17: believe this is in draft, want to move this along quickly

How do we publish that RFCs are in public review? RFC Process says publish on a new community channel, #tc-rfcs has been created for this purpose.

5-10 minPossible Budget Surplus

From Maccabee Levine in #tc-internal slack:

From this morning's CC meeting: CC is looking at a possible budget surplus next FY due to discontinuing the developer position (Mikhal) and expected reductions in AWS costs (details).  There was discussion about asking the other councils for input on possible spending priorities, and CC would discuss again at their next meeting in 2w.  From the minutes:

  • Options for spending $150,000 - $200,000 in FY24?
    • Pay for other needed positions in the organization?
    • Buy out part/half time of individuals to perform needed functions?
      • Dev lead?
    • Other wish list items from the project?

Previous Notes:

  • Spitballing ideas
    • Jeremy Huff: How is CI pipeline funded?
      • Marc Johnson AWS costs paid under these funds.  Personnel volunteered by various orgs.  Traditionally it was predominantly Index Data, now some EBSCO/EPAM people.
      • Jeremy Huff Community would be served by ownership / responsibility of that process.  Interested in pursuing / defining more clearly.
    • Maccabee Levine Part funding dev lead / mentor for new developers?  Funding part of someone's time on community dev support.
      • Tod Olson Can we just re-fund Mikhal?  Not taking that loss would be great.
      • Jeremy Huff Support anything that keeps him on the project, but maybe crowd-sourcing this.  Proposals from the community to award an initiative?
  • Jenn Colt Do we know that funding would be stable?
    • Marc Johnson Discontinuing community-funded developer position was part of it.
    • Jenn Colt One-time funding or ongoing?
    • Jeremy Huff Also might be able to fund something for X years.
  • Jeremy Huff and Maccabee Levine drafted two proposals, shared on Monday to #tc-internal.
  • Goal today is to see if we have TC approval for one or both, as DRAFTS, i.e. we support the general idea.  For presentation to CC as a potential proposal, as PC did about AirTable a few meetings back.  If CC is willing to hear more, then we can discuss on TC how to proceed.

Today

  • Which, if any ideas does the TC support?
    • That is, do any of these ideas have enough merit that we would like to advance to conversation with CC & PC
  • Five six ideas pitched:
    • Fund a FOLIO Reference environment: community takes responsibility for a full "official" reference environment
      • Reactions: 7 in support, moves forward
    • Community Developer advocate: fund part of the time for a developer to help onboarding/documentation, fits well with TC charge
      • Reactions: 5 in support, 1 abstain.  Florian Gleixner (absent today) also supported on Monday.
    • Security audit: 
      • Reactions: 7 in support
    • Privacy SIG: fund a person work with SIG to create tooling to support privacy analysis 
      • Reactions: 6 in support
    • Innovation Grant:
      • Reactions: 6 in support
    • Fund migration CI/CD pipeline from Jenkins to GitHub actions, work is on hold due to lack of bandwidth; idea is to decrease demand on DevOps team:
      • Reactions: 7 in support

Decision: all of these have support, Maccabee Levine will reach out to other councils about these ideas, will let CC know immediately and ask for slot on next available agenda.

5-10 minOfficially Supported Technologies - UpkeepAll

A process was proposed for how to keep these pages up-to-date, we need to revisit and put some processes into place.  As it stands right now, we have members of the community making changes w/o consulting the TC.

Previous Notes:

  • Florian Gleixner advised that he added a header including page properties for some of the release pages for folks to review
  • Craig McNally asked what states do we want for these pages e.g. Draft, Final? 
    • Jeremy Huff suggested Active (for actively being defined by the TC), Supported (for after initial version is finalised, yet may still change) and No longer supported (for after the support period for the release has ended)
    • Marc Johnson wondered how we would come up with the list of statuses, without figuring out the process for maintaining these policy documents
    • Jeremy Huff asked how we determine during the module evaluation process, which release's supported technologies they should be judged against? Marc Johnson and Craig McNally advised that this would be the release currently ongoing at the time of submission
    • Jeremy Huff suggested that we could use Confluence's page restrictions functionality for limiting who can change these documents and add some clarifying text to advise folks contact the TC to submit changes. Craig McNally volunteered to investigate this
    • Craig McNally asked for volunteers for defining a list of statuses and adding a description of the process to the top level page. Jeremy Huff volunteered to take these on

Action: Craig McNally will start that conversation.  Why it would be easier to manage this on our own.

Action: Jeremy Huff Capture this on the wiki, including intro language.  Add metadata to each page as well.


Today:

  • Let's try to pick this up again
5-10 min

Browser support

All

From slack:

There's a conversation in the PC channel about browser support... I don't want to stick our collective nose into other's business, but is this something the TC should be weighing in on?  It feels like it's somewhat of a grey area.  Thoughts?  See https://folio-project.slack.com/archives/CTYQZ7PF1/p1682096515922269


Previous Notes:

  • Craig McNally provided some real-world stats for browser usage in production sites
  • Zak Burke provided a draft statement on browser testing

Today:

  • Where does this stand?
  • Would like a single statement that all three councils can line up behind.
  • Action: Zak Burke will work to resolve comments in Browser support, bring back to TC next week to vote.
time permittingTerminology DocumentAll

From Jenn Colt in slack:

@cmcnally for the TC agenda next week, this is what I think we need: a vote on whether to accept the document as it is now (with our deletions) but with a statement adding that there are other definitions of platform in use. I believe Simeon/Kristin/me will get that statement in before the meeting. I think that vote is what we need to give CC. After that we should discuss whether people want to participate in a new group to talk more about the definition of platform. I think people may also indicate that there are other definitions they would also like to revise. After this vote, I think it will be the end of my involvement with the doc on this level and someone else should consider coordinating TC proposing some definitions. Right now it seems like we are not happy with existing definitions but don't have alternatives to propose, but that is just my assessment of where things are.


Notes: We get a lazy consensus to accept the document as it is. 

Maybe the best thing we can do is to form a TC subgroup which is open to other members of the community.

  • All the councils have accepted the draft document as-is.  Except specifically for the "platforms" definition(s), TC is invited by CC to keep that going.
  • Craig McNally : Better for a regular TC meeting.

Topic Backlog





Action Items

  • Craig McNally to investigate using Confluence's page restrictions to limit editing of the officially supported technologies lists
  • Jeremy Huff will propose a list of statuses for the officially supported technologies documents
  • Jeremy Huff will add a description of the process for changes to the officially supported technology processes to the top level page