Agenda
The Inaugural discussion
Things BU hopes to get out of the meeting:
- guiding insight from Jim on the overarching issues, what he's able to support, and the general pattern of how we can collaborate with him on this work.
- volunteers for writing some sort of spec or project description for meeting these requirements, with the aim of having it completed by the end of the conference (and using BOF sessions to get there, as needed).
- some clarity on the timeframes and priorities of other institutions
- some clarity on who is able to do what work. Or, better put, what resources do we have? Is there a QA specialist in the house? A UI designer? Are our developers new to Sakai or initiates into its deeper mysteries?
Participants
Jim Eng
Chuck Severance
UNISA
- Francette Myburgh
- Johan van den Berg
BU
- Clay Fenlason
- Max Ekstrom
- Soo Il Kim
Minutes
(Rough, paraphrased minutes)
Jim: Is it just the two issues we're looking at here?
Clay: I think there are actually 3 pieces for us. 1) The ability to toggle availability, 2) The ability to schedule this availability, 3) The re-ordering of resources. If we had to prioritize them, they'd go in order of 1,3,2
Francette: UNISA already has a system for scheduling the release/retraction of content outside of Sakai. Toggling would be nice, but we really need the scheduling portion.
Jim: I think all of that is do-able, so we're not in a position of needing to choose between them. Has there been any UI discussion happening yet?
Clay: The first two pieces are easy. The re-ordering of resources is more difficult to think about. We haven't really done this yet, though Mike has posted some notes.
Francette: What does "Fall" mean, exactly?
Clay: Our classes start the beginning of September, so we need to have things in place early August.
Jim: And that means that we want the coding work done by early July, so that we have time for QA.
Jim: Did everyone see the conversation with Vivie about Melete?
Chuck: That's a red herring. We're talking about things that are technically simple, and are basic to Resource management. Melete has different purposes, often more sophisticated ones, and this job shouldn't be on Melete's plate.
Clay: Beyond the technical issues, it would be something of a user experience problem to have to bring to bear two different tools to solve these basic problems.
Chuck: The tricky part with all this is that the Security needs to happen in Content Hosting. It's not just about WebDAV and Resources, but also about attachments in all the other tools, and whether they'd be broken.
Jim: That shouldn't be an issue. Things like the Calendar still use the "Copy paradigm", like when people add attachments from their MyWorkspace.
Chuck: OK, if that's true then it settles a lot of my concerns about this work breaking other stuff.
Chuck: The other big issue is the interface, and whether we can achieve some interface consensus that the community will accept.
Jim: Right. This work isn't technically challenging - it's the UI that's going to be the limiting factor.
Chuck: I think these pieces will take us in the right direction. Longer term it would be good to have more symmetry between folders and files, but I don't think there are bigger issues that this work needs to worry about.
Johan: Do you need development resources from UNISA?
Jim: Yes, I could use some help, but it would take time to get up to speed with the Sakai content apps. Since we're talking about doing the coding work just in June/July, it may not be worth it for someone to make a short-term commitment here. What I'd really hope for is some longer-term commitment.
Johan: We're comfortable committing in that way. We've also done a lot of work with WebDAV, etc., and feel we're up to speed with the Sakai code in this area. We've already passed our learning curve.
Clay: We're not up to speed with Sakai's content apps, so we're likely to be more help with design questions or smaller tasks that might be parcelled out.
Jim: Next steps - it looks reasonable to do all the work described, but figuring out the interface is going to be the most important and difficult thing. Are there any ideas about the sort-order interface?
Clay: Mike seems to be leading the charge on that question, and it may be good to wait for his input. We can start working this out online.
Francette: We can contribute some UI designs over the next 10 days or so.
Clay: I'll put up a Confluence page where we can start to collect some design notes and post screenshots.
Jim: I'd like to see this work as part of the release.
Clay: Would we be doing this work in a branch, or in the trunk?
Jim: We'd probably start in a branch, but these things are what a lot of people want, and we can easily hide them from a default installation if people don't want them. I'd like to see it included perhaps in the next maintenance release. I'd rather not have it available as just a patch.
Clay: Do you not see any implications for QA, or extra QA time needed to vet this code?
Jim: No. The questions Chuck was asking earlier are the important ones, and there shouldn't be a real impact on other tools.
... closed with the suggestion that we should meet during the conference.