Project Coordination Meeting

Notes from meeting:
Mara's PC Meeting Notes.doc
Kirk's PC Meeting Notes.doc
Mark's PC Meeting Notes.txt

Audio recordings of meeting:
[Morning]
[Afternoon]

Overall Schedule

Now thru Saturday 9 June 2007 Pre-Meeting Discussions

The primary goal for Pre-Meeting Discussions on the topics below is to create strawman proposals which can be used to focus discussion at the actual meeting. Or, in cases where there is an obvious emerging consensus, to produce a proposal that can be voted on and eliminate the need for further discussion at the meeting, thereby freeing up time for the remaining, more contentious topics. This venue will also provide a way for project team members who are unable to attend to inject their thoughts and suggestions into the process.

Discussion will be carried out in this Confluence space. Each topic has its own page in this space. The topic headings in the list below link to these discussion pages. You can comment at the bottom of each page, as well as edit page content or add attachments. I will also act as an editor/moderator from time to time, when appropriate, moving or summarizing content from comments into the page and removing the comments, in order to keep things organized and the discussion focused.

Saturday 9 June 2007 Project Coordination Meeting at Movenpick

This will be the primary meeting day, and likely the only day we can get together as a full group.

Sunday 10 June 2007 Break-out sessions as needed.

Unfortunately we weren't able to secure a meeting space for Sunday in time, so you will have to gather at your favourite cafe or park.

Monday 11 June 2007 - Thursday 14 June 2007 Sakai Conference

I would also like to encourage folks - particularly the Sakaipert developers among you who aren't tied up with the Programmer's Cafe on Monday, 11 June 2007 - to consider participating in the U-Camp, since you're already going to be around. A short, joint session will also be held between the U-Camp and Programmer's Cafe on Monday as well.

Project Coordination Meeting Agenda

Remote Participation instructions.

Proposed Topics

The is no implied order to the topics below. We will begin the meeting with a brief poll to prioritize the topics for discussion, adding any last minute additions. Please participate in the pre-meeting discussions on these topics so that we can use the meeting time as effectively as possible!

• Sharing of project plans - We will work our way around the room giving each project team a chance to share what they've achieved to-date for 2.5 and what their remaining plans are for 2.5 and beyond. (Please limit your overview to 5-minutes to ensure we have enough time to tackle the remainder of our ambitious agenda!)
  • Project Teams
  • Cross-Project Project Teams
    • Internationalization - I18N (Beth)
    • Accessibility (Mike)
    • QA-Release (Megan, Lance, Andrew)
    • User Experience - FLUID (Colin)
• Cross-Project Topics for Discussion
  • Communication
    • Keeping the Sakai community and each other informed of our ongoing activities and plans.
      • Response rate poor on keeping PC pages in your spaces current
        • Already reduced it to a single "update" from both a "status" and a "plans" view.
      • How can we better capture this information in a timely manner?
      • How can we better balance the need for some of us to work "privately" with open communication with our colleagues?
    • Is the Requirements Process/Jira Voting working for communicating community priorities and project team priority setting?
  • Freezes, Releases and Versions
    • Freezes
      • What does "code freeze" mean to you?
      • What should it mean for Sakai?
      • Should we have a timleline of freezes for different purposes?
    • Releases
      • Current version of "release" document
      • Should we have "official" releases and "provisional" releases?
        • Official ones would only include Supported projects and would be QA'ed
        • Provisional ones would include Supported and Provisional tools, but without extensive QA; and could be released more often?
      • What belongs in an official release?
      • How to handle big changes to supported projects?
        • Should they spend time as an optional piece? (sort of like Provisional; implementers can choose the existing Supported one, or decide to live on the edge and use the new Provisional version)
      • Cut back to one release per year?
      • Framework Release versus Project Team releases?
    • Versions
      • What to do about interim project team releases (e.g., a post-2.4 but pre-2.5 release version of Rooster, Assignments, Resources)?
      • Do we have a Framework version, and then each project team is free to do its own thing? (Means we need to split Jira up into separate "projects", rather than the current method of "components" in one project.
    • Branches
      • What type of branches do we want to support and how should we label them?
        • Production?
        • Maintenance?
        • Secuirity?
        • Trunk?
      • How do tags figure into this, especially if the release process changes?
      • New versioning scheme?
      • What to do about interim project releases (e.g., a post-2.4 but pre-2.5 release version of Rooster, Assignments, Resources)
  • Upgrades
    • Current list of things to consider upgrading for Sakai 2.5:
      • Tomcat
      • Spring
      • Java 1.5 to 1.6
      • Maven to 2
  • Permissions
    • Should we have a policy of creating new permissions so that things mean what they say, rather than leveraging existing and often obliquely related ones?
      • site.upd issues for flexibility of delegation
  • Sites and Their Data
    • Deleting, Undeleting, Purging, Reseting, Archiving, Restoring, Showing and Hiding for Sites, Tools, and Their Content; what do these terms mean to people?
      • Mixed bag right now
      • how do you permanently delete a site or a tool and its contents?
      • what to do about links to deleted stuff?
      • hide versus purge distinction?
  • Collaboration Barriers
    • Temporal and spatial barriers to real-time collaboration and decision making in Sakai project teams (Stephen)
  • Patch Week
    • Integrating patches, where do we fit the review and integration of community contributions into the release cycle?
  • User Delight
    • What should our general approach for UI/UX/User Delight be going forward?
    • What is needed to ensure all stages of the UX improvement process are covered from design to coding to testing on all project teams?
    • How will Fluid integrate? (Colin? Daphne?)
    • Are there new development resources for addressing UX issues in exsiting code-base?
  • Tool Status
    • Core/Provisional/Contrib Promotions and Guidelines/Criteria (Peter)
    • Start using "Supported" instead of "Core"?
    • Criteria for Supported Status document (Mark)
    • How to treat a major re-write of an existing Core tool, (e.g., Chat in 2.4)
    • Deprecating Projects
      • deprecation procedure
      • Core to Provisional or to Contrib? (e.g., Chat in 2.4, perhaps Discussion in 2.5)
    • What does "run in production" mean to everyone?
    • Should we encourage running in production by shipping with all Provisional tools enabled, but with a list of known issues to help folks decide what to turn off?
    • Tools versus Services; handle the same or differently
      • What is a good alternate path and criteria for Services?
      • Can we split project summary tables into tools and services? This would "hide" many of the rows that are confusing to end-users who only want to know about tools.
  • Junit Testing (Josh)
    • Junit testing and Sakai
  • Internationalization (Beth)
    • Make it easier to do by moving non-internationalization related items out of .properties files and into .config files
    • Adopt Localized Date/Time Widget for all tools
  • Community Building
    • Expanding Project Teams and the pool of "certified" designers, developers and QA resources
    • Recruiting new resources; mentoring model for maintenance-mode projects (Peter)
    • Recent Experiences on Expansion
      • OSP experience (Beth?)
      • Gradebook experience (Kirk?)
      • Resources (Jim? Clay?)
    • Assessment-related tools; collaboration potential? (Mark? Lois?)
    • Project Team Responsibilities - need to grow what teams do for themselves as they expand
      • Project Management and Reporting
      • Processing Community Input (i.e., Requirements and Jira Voting; enhancements versus defects?); pick one to champion and regularly advertise as the mechanism for gathering and gauging community interests?
  • Roadmap (Peter)
    • What's beyond 2.5? (Only ~2-months to 2.5 code freeze! 1-month to a feature freeze? [Relative to the time of this meeting!])
      • What's next? 2.6?
      • What's next-next? 2.7? 3.0?
      • Relates to the discussion of potentially changing the number of releases we do per year.
    • How can we balance collaboration with rapid development, healthy competition and best-of-breed?
    • Projects are maturing and expanding. What commitments can be made to the future?
      • How far out can people make commitments for at this point? 2.6? 2.7? one month? three months? six months? one year?
      • Who do you work with at your local organization to decide what you're going to work on? Do you have free rein?
      • How can we help educate and foster collaboration at the level of resource-commitment/control across organizations in order to better support design and development of cross-project and community goals?
  • Entity Broker (Peter)
    • Entity Broker purpose - make it easier for developers to use Sakai entities, allow better control over the URL space
    • Entity Broker design
    • Entity Broker usage
    • Entity Broker demonstration
• Identify and volunteer for to-do items
• Organize break-out groups for Sunday or Conference BOFs as needed
  • Possible topics for break-out groups (will bring up during walk-through of agenda to see if there is group-wide interest)
    • Documentation
      • Everyone thinks Sakai's information architecture is "bad". What can we do to move it forward?
      • Are there concrete proposals out there for improving it? And, who is available to do the work?
    • Making Sakai easier to adopt. (Hannah)
    • Jira - suggestions for improving workflow?
• Things I'm tracking as potential topics. Expecting proposals to circulate on sakai-dev for these so at the minimum a framing discussion can occur on the list prior to the meeting.
  • Proposed Privacy-related extensions to UserDirectoryService (e.g., Confidentiality Flag) and Sakai's Privacy Features in general. (Clay? Patty? Lance?)
  • Provisional API Strawman from Ian, comments from many; where to best place it above or a new separate topic?
  • Getting someone to work on the Sites (Gateway) performance issues (John Leasia).
  • Developing a "gradebook service" (John Leasia).

Attendees

The Project Association column lists the projects that I believe you are going to be providing a status report on during the first part of our agenda. (If there is more than one of you listed for a specific project, perhaps you could elect one person to provide the overview?)

Anyone that is a Sakai partner is welcome to observe the meeting, however, space is limited. If we run out of room, we may have to ask those listed below as Observers to entertain themselves otherwise in beautiful city of Amsterdam.