2009-10-14 Product Council Meeting

Owned by Former user (Deleted)
Last updated: May 14, 2010Version comment
3 min read

Phone number: 1 (812)856-7060
Internet: 156.56.240.9
Room code: 348#
Password: 72524#

Agenda

  1. Mature Sakai 2 capabilities and criteria for release readiness
  2. Reviewing the Product Council's charge/scope

Development Efforts formally considered
2.7 Exercise
Simple Scorecard
Supported Criteria doc

Product Council Structure and Governance

Attendees

  • Max Whitney
  • Michael Feldstein
  • Noah Botimer
  • Michael Korcuska
  • Eli Cochran
  • David Goodrum
  • Clay Fenlason

Minutes

New Sakai 2 Capabilities

  • Proposal 1: As an exercise of our criteria, we start with a focused study of the Sakai 2 capabilities. Since these have all effectively completed a product development stage, they are however facing an assessment of release readiness and not graduation from incubation to product development. Not a full exercise of our process and criteria, then, but a pragmatic way to get started.
  • Proposal 2: Over the next two weeks each of us volunteers to take a particular category of review, reusing some of the earlier Scorecard thinking where helpful, and review each of the Sakai 2 capabilities currently in incubation. The aim is not only to identify gaps that would need to be closed before release readiness, but also to see what the exercise teaches us about our criteria.
  • Because we're closer to release readiness with these projects, and near the end of 2.x's life cycle, maybe something more rough and ready might be appropriate and not a full review. There are immediate gut reactions on a few things. It becomes hard to argue against some of these Sakai 2 tools unless there's a really egregious problem.
  • Could still be a good exercise. A kind of warm-up for a deeper treatment of criteria for Sakai 3.
  • Difficulty should be a factor.
  • What's the decision point, exactly? What should we be measuring against?
  • We are trying to assess whether these tools or capabilities should be a core part of a Sakai 2 release bundle. We should not be putting any new things into provisional status anymore.
  • These projects can continue to develop and put out their own releases, which our own release documentation might in fact link to and recommend with certain caveats. It's only that they wouldn't yet be bundled in and maintained as a core part of Sakai if release readiness is not achieved.
  • We're taking the scorecard criteria developed in discussions following the Paris conference as among our reference material - a starting point, but not an endpoint.
  • There will also be considerations that the scorecard does not address, e.g. weighing functional addition against user need and a coherent product definition.

Reviewing the Product Council's charge/scope

  • Back around the time of the Boston conference we talked about refining the charge of the product council, along with the question of how we organize ourselves (e.g. would there be a council chair of some sort?). We haven't taken these questions up again since.
  • We needn't take them up just now, the sort of practical work just discussed is a better focus, but after another few months it would be good to reflect on what's been done and how it's gone and tune these issues at that point.

Next Steps

Sakai 2 projects will be reviewed for release readiness from the following vantage points:

1) Technical Elements and Interoperability (Noah Botimer and Max Whitney)
2) Design, i18n and a11y (Eli Cochran)
3) Documentation and Community Support (Michael Feldstein, David
Goodrum and Clay Fenlason)

We'll talk about these on-list and with community participation, and for the next meeting come back together and discuss what's been learned.