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Table of Contents
PMC Meeting: April 16, 2024
Attending: Chris Hallberg, Demian Katz, André Lahmann, Ere Maijala, Josef Moravec, Peter Murray, Mohan Raj Pradhan
Apologies: Oliver Goldschmidt, Craig Murdoch
1. Review of Action Items from Previous Meeting
- 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
2. Goal Review
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)
3. Documentation
Maintenance Plan
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 external package updates.
Discussion of plugin for finding old pages.
Output grep command to HTML for pasting into page? Cron job to auto-generate page.
Demian will also create a page of top-50 accessed pages from 2023; we can initial when they are reviewed.
Page Updates
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).
Artificial Intelligence
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.
PMC Article
No updates this month.
4. Fundraising
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?
5. WOLFcon 2024
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.
6. Wiki Account Management
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.
7. Possible Future Actions
Some other possible items for the future:
- “Good first issue” highlighting
- Investigate getting a VPAT
- Outreach to forks for new feature contributions