Attending: Chris Hallberg, Demian Katz, André Lahmann, Ere Maijala, Josef Moravec, Peter Murray, Mohan Raj Pradhan

Apologies: Oliver Goldschmidt, Craig Murdoch

• Demian/Mohan: make further progress on documentation updates. ONGOING
• Mohan: Share example eBook with PMC when ready (for discussion of “supports the project” logo/wording). ONGOING
• Chris: Review accessibility of current vufind.org theme. ONGOING
• André / Craig: Begin drafting article about PMC development and sustainability. ONGOING
• Leila / André: Continue investigating possible applications of AI tools to support the community. ONGOING
• André / Demian: begin planning Call for Papers for Summit. ONGOING
• Demian: Monitor growth of spam account sign-ups in wiki. ONGOING
• Demian: draft documentation management plan. DONE
• Demian: submit some proposals for WOLFcon. DONE

This year's goals:

• Release versions 10.0 and 10.1
• Hold a VuFind® Summit in Fall, 2024 linked with WOLFcon in some way
• Develop a documentation maintenance plan
• Investigate possible uses of AI for documentation, support, code reviews, etc.
• Perform literature review in Code4lib Journal/other sources regarding PMC/sustainability; draft and contribute an article if there is a sufficient need/gap.
• Marketing improvements (review vufind.org accessibility, improve content as needed)

Demian has drafted a Documentation Maintenance page.

We discussed where to link it in the overall wiki organization once it is finalized. “Get Involved” on Community page was the chosen place. Demian will publish it there.

Mohan mentioned the need to account for changes to external package that VuFind® interacts with. Since there are so many possible interactions, it is impossible to cover everything; however, we can try to prioritize double-checking accurate documentation of integration with systems mentioned in high-traffic pages.

Right now, identifying old pages requires command-line access to the wiki server; there was discussion about the possibility of building a plugin to display this information in a more automated fashion. Another option is to develop a script to output grep command and build an HTML page that can be automatically pushed to a web-accessible location. A cron job could be used to automate this page generation process. Chris and Demian will investigate possibilities.

Demian will also create a page of top-50 accessed pages from 2023; we can initial when they are reviewed.

Demian has finished updating Koha documentation based on Mohan's latest input. More updates may still be forthcoming.

Demian and Mohan should update the DOAJ page and create a NepJol page based on recent experiments.

Work is still pending on the PubMed Central “open data sources” page. Mohan also plans to contribute documentation related to integrating SubjectsPlus (which recently had example XSLT import configs added to the project) and Moodle (which is still being researched).

Peter did some experimentation with a service called Unblocked, which uses a large language model to take in source code, documentation, websites, tickets, etc. and provides a chat service. He tested it with VuFind inputs and found that it provided fairly reasonable responses to his questions. The service is currently in free beta mode and will work out funding models in future. Peter can send invitations to his test instance if anyone else is interested in trying it out.

There was discussion about how to incorporate this if we were to go down this type of road: would we share such a thing with the general community, or would we use it internally to help generate responses, but mediate those responses to avoid misleading people with inaccurate AI-generated content?

Chris gave the example of MDN, which includes an AI-powered interface but precedes it with consent and disclaimer information to be sure people understand the context and limitations.

This link can be used to invite yourself to my test installation of Unblocked using the VuFind code, Jira issues, and vufind.org website content: https://getunblocked.com/team/2ab29fb0-3249-4811-af4d-e4243db36db5/invite/e96c758f-71c8-4071-9d5a-2b1db8188107

No updates this month.

The project recently received an anonymous $1500 donation.

Last time, Chris mentioned the github-stats project, which might be useful to communicate value/effort using GitHub data. Should we do anything with this? Demian noticed that OpenHub stats are broken on vufind.org; he will work with Chris to fix this, and if it can't be fixed, maybe github-stats can be used to replace it in some fashion.

The “save the date” has been sent out for the German Summit, and quite a few good VuFind®-related proposals have been submitted to WOLFcon. Demian proposed the usual “state of the project” talk (which he plans to give at both events) as well as a FOLIO ILS driver session specifically for WOLFcon. There are quite a few other VuFind®-related proposals in the pipeline, so there will be a healthy amount of content.

CFP planning is underway for the German Summit; will be published by end of next week or beginning of the following week. André will reach out to Demian with more details soon.

The wiki user file has grown from 2.1MB to 2.3MB since last month. That's not a huge amount of disk space, but it does demonstrate that there are a lot of spam accounts being created. Demian will continue to monitor.

It may be worth investigating IP addresses of suspicious signups to see if there are patterns we can use to block bad sign-ups.

Ere suggested looking into the Stop Forum Spam service. There may be an existing plugin for Dokuwiki. The preregistration plugin and two-factor auth plugin may also be worth trying. Preregistration can't be tried until some email sending issues at Villanova are resolved.

Demian noted that we are already using CAPTCHA, but the spammers are circumventing it.

It was also noted that no actual spam page creation/editing is currently taking place; perhaps these accounts are being created for some future action. It's also possible that spam is being prevented because new users are not allowed to create pages.

There was also discussion of methodologies for removing existing junk accounts – e.g. get list of users who have edited pages, and remove anyone else.

Some other possible items for the future:

• “Good first issue” highlighting
• Investigate getting a VPAT
• Outreach to forks for new feature contributions
• Look at It Take a Village Toolkit Governance Activities.
• Look at It Take a Village Toolkit Technology Activities.

Chris has used WAVE to analyze a few vufind.org pages, which revealed a few minor contrast issues, lack of heading structure, etc. He's going to work on some improvements soon, which will show up as a PR when ready. Feel free to contact Chris if you have suggestions for things that should be featured on the home page as he works on making improvements.

• Demian/Mohan: make further progress on documentation updates.
• Mohan: Share example eBook with PMC when ready (for discussion of “supports the project” logo/wording).
• Chris: Open PR to make accessibility improvements to vufind.org theme.
• André / Craig: Begin drafting article about PMC development and sustainability.
• Leila / André / Peter: Continue investigating possible applications of AI tools to support the community.
• André / Demian: continue Summit planning activities.
• Chris / Demian: Begin experimenting with suggested activities to reduce wiki spam accounts.
• Chris / Demian: Investigate broken OpenHub footer on vufind.org; begin setting up github-stats if needed.
• Demian: Publish documentation maintenance plan.
• Chris / Demian: Make outdated / heavily accessed page reports available to support documentation maintenance plan.