PMC Meeting: February 13, 2023

Attending: Anne Christensen, Chris Hallberg, Demian Katz, André Lahmann, Ere Maijala, David Maus, Mohan Raj Pradhan

Apologies: Oliver Goldschmidt, Leila Gonzales, Craig Murdoch, Leander Seige

• ALL: submit signed Conflict of Interest policy acknowledgments to Demian for submission to the OLF (if you haven't already). ONGOING
• ALL: review/comment on/approve Conflict of Interest changes to governance document: pull request #2653 DONE
• ALL: consider whether to renew for a second PMC term when our two year anniversary arrives in April, 2023. ONGOING
• Demian/Mohan: make further progress on updating Koha installation and Open Data Sources wiki pages. ONGOING
• André/Demian: continue investigation of lokalise platform for i18n. ONGOING
• Demian: follow up on pending RSP payments. DONE (but some payments still pending)
• André: investigate potential costs of a security audit. ONGOING
• Demian: Add David as a GitHub committer. DONE
• Demian: Schedule a meeting to discuss training/documentation with Mohan and interested RSP representatives. ONGOING (waiting for responses to RSP follow-up)
• Demian: Send RSP form link to Mohan. DONE
• Demian: Change email address in Code of Conduct to info@vufind.org. DONE

The Documentation Survey closed on February 6. The survey revealed a few areas where action may be possible:

• The newsletter should clarify which future release(s) will include completed work. Demian will start doing this going forward.
• No one seems to use or care about the autogenerated PHPDocumentor documentation, and there were complaints about the verbosity of the comments that power it (though comments were generally regarded as useful/valuable). This points to the possibility of reviewing our PHP_CodeSniffer rules and possibly changing the way we approach PHPDoc comments, since this has not been reviewed or changed in over a decade, and PHP has significantly evolved (e.g. with typehints built into the language which render many doc comments redundant).
  • David/Ere agreed that there's room for improvement here. More typehints, fewer redundant docblocks. Better hints about exceptions needed. Perhaps allow lines longer than 80 characters. Need new tooling – one starting point: enforce typehints via phpstan. PHP 8 also allows for better typing than PHP 7 and may further reduce the redundancy. Challenge: adding types will impact downstream code. Challenge: introducing types can introduce bugs; more tests may be needed. VuFind 10 might be a good target for a large type-related project. David asked, can we tag different files in VuFind to have different PHP_CodeSniffer rules applied so that we can begin a gradual transition?
• References to older versions cause some confusion, and raise concerns about documentation being out of date. Should we remove or rephrase this for versions before a particular threshold?
  • Ere asked whether we need version-specific pages in some cases? Can we use a struct plugin to control this in a more structured way? André asked if we should consider snapshotting versions of the wiki at points in time to refer to specific versions? (If so, how do we document upcoming features?). Alternative proposal from Demian: simply state that documentation should be accurate for some number of recent VuFind releases (e.g. latest 2-3 major releases). Older notes could be removed. Since VuFind is designed to be fairly evergreen, this might be a more maintainable solution, and encourage people to upgrade from very old versions while still leaving likelihood of most documentation still applying to older versions. Mohan highlighted the need to upgrade documentation relating to VuFind's integration with third-party systems, since these also change frequently and may require documentation updates. Ere's suggestion: If we remove old version notes from the wiki, we can note this in the version summary to make the notes findable in the version history list.
• A user requested a sitemap/content map, but the site already has one (Sitemap button at bottom of page). Can we make the sitemap more visible and/or more useful? (Right now it's fairly unreadable/unhelpful since it just uses the short URL names of pages).
• There were layout-related requests – more whitespace/better layout/more visual content like screen shots. Should we identify some specific pages that would benefit from this and work on reformatting them? Would more general CSS tweaks help?
• A significant number of respondents indicated that the documentation needs more examples. Are there obvious areas where we should add more?
  • There was a request for a “howto” page explaining how to extend code from the VuFindSearch module.
• It was suggested that the "Features" page should be updated and expanded – this ties in with the marketing improvements already on our to-do list.
• There was a request for more context in the changelog; Demian will try to do better on this.
• Video tutorials seem to be very well-regarded; the Learning VuFind® book has not been used as heavily but has significant positive (and no negative) feedback.

Chris suggested that a video highlighting 9.0 changes would be useful – Chris, Demian and Ere will collaborate on this.

Susan Turkel at Villanova is willing to do some review/editorial work if we define a project for her.

Discussion: Is it worth sharing any of these results (or a summary) on the wiki? Mohan suggested capturing our results so that after making changes we can repeat the survey and compare against future results.

Demian and Mohan continue to collaborate on Koha documentation.

Work is still pending on MeSH, DoAJ, PubMed Central and NepJol “open data sources” pages. Mohan also plans to contribute documentation related to integrating other software packages like SubjectsPlus and Moodle, which also support OAI-PMH.

Demian is still waiting for a couple more submissions but expects them soon.

André is still working on this. He will make a determination by Friday, 2/17, whether we should use the new translation platform for the 9.0 release translation cycle, or if we should continue to do things “the old way” for one more release before attempting to transition.

HealthNet Nepal has joined as our fourth RSP.

Demian is still working on three more pending memberships.

The time/place of WOLFcon 2023 has been tentatively set as August 22-24 in Chicago, IL. We need to determine who can attend, what we will present, and how this should relate to the Summit.

Demian expects that he should be able to attend.

Based on input from Mohan, Demian suggested a panel to discuss grants and collaborative fundraising strategies with other OLF projects.

Mohan suggested a goal-setting exercise for the PMC, to have a plan for the work of the coming year.

Some possible/likely goals:

• Release versions 9.0 and 9.1 (April / October?)
• Hold a VuFind Summit in Summer, 2023 linked with WOLFcon in some way
• Run fundraising campaign in parallel with summer conference season
• Complete a documentation improvement project
• Complete a website improvement project (marketing-oriented)
• Finish implementation of standard translation platform
• Investigate possible training partnerships and fundraising around training materials

Next planned “membership drive” – in tandem with next Summit, which in turn will likely be timed around the next WOLFcon.

See December 12, 2022 minutes for brainstorming notes about use of funds.

Some other possible items for the future:

• Develop a documentation maintenance plan
• “Good first issue” highlighting
• Outreach to forks for new feature contributions
• Marketing project (better VuFind® definition, website improvements, etc.)
• Publication / presentation efforts related to PMC and sustainability
• Look at It Take a Village Toolkit Governance Activities.
• Look at It Take a Village Toolkit Technology Activities.

David asked whether there is a mechanism for monitoring the health of external services in VuFind – errors, slow responses, etc.

Demian uses Microsoft Teams to collect data about exceptions.

Ere suggests that it might be possible to use a custom HTTP client to collect more detailed statistics about things like response times.

Ere also highlighted the value of using different php-fpm pools for different types of requests to avoid getting bogged down by slow third party services.

David plans to share a presentation on Solr statistics in the future.

Mohan notes that other RSPs have supported some of the same packages that HealthNet has worked with – DSpace, Koha, Moodle, etc. – and will work with Demian to investigate opportunities to collaborate on documentation.

• ALL: submit signed Conflict of Interest policy acknowledgments to Demian for submission to the OLF (if you haven't already).
• ALL: consider whether to renew for a second PMC term when our two year anniversary arrives in April, 2023.
• Demian/Mohan: make further progress on updating Koha installation and Open Data Sources wiki pages.
• André/Demian: continue investigation of lokalise platform for i18n (decide whether or not to use lokalise translations for release 9.0 by Friday, February 17).
• André: investigate potential costs of a security audit.
• Demian: Schedule a meeting to discuss training/documentation with Mohan and interested RSP representatives.
• Chris/Demian/Ere: Develop a video to highlight 9.0 changes when the release is finalized.
• Demian: Work with Susan to begin an inventory of wiki content (outdated pages, references to old versions, etc.)
• Any interested parties: Begin research to improve or replace PHP_CodeSniffer, to improve quality of DocBlocks.
• Demian/Leila (if willing): Capture high-level documentation survey results in wiki for future reference.
• ALL: Think about documentation improvements for further discussion next time.
• ALL: Think about whether/how to participate in WOLFcon 2023.
• Demian: include “recruiting a new member” on the agenda for next month, since Leander does not plan to renew for a second term.
• Demian: include documentation on a future Community Call agenda for further discussion.