Table of Contents
VuFind Community Call Minutes: September 7, 2021
Attending: Chris Hallberg, Demian Katz, Ere Maijala, Bob Scheier, Mario Trojan
Agenda
1. Development Planning
Newsletter Highlights
The August, 2021 Newsletter was discussed.
Future of JIRA
Demian continues to work with the OLF to determine the easiest way to transition to a cloud-based JIRA instance.
Javascript Dependencies
Work has resumed on pull request #1799; it seems likely this will be merged in time for the 8.0 release.
Mario believes it is ready to go; Ere is going to do final testing.
Possible Laminas Deprecations
No news; Demian will begin investigating this in more detail following the VuFind 8.0 release.
Static Analysis Tools
The latest release of phpstan found a few new issues in the code; they have all been fixed.
utf8mb4 Database Encoding
The work in pull request #2019 has been merged and will be included in the 8.0 release.
Release 8.0
The release date has been set for September 20, 2021. Demian is working hard to complete all outstanding JIRA tickets and pull requests and plans to have code fully frozen by the end of the week. If you have time to help with any of this work, either by reviewing code, testing, or implementing, please coordinate with Demian.
2. VuFind Summit
Demian reminded everyone that the Call for Papers is currently open for the 2021 Virtual VuFind Summit.
3. It Takes a Village Toolkit Beta: Community Planning Exercise
It Takes a Village is a set of tools and recommendations designed to help open source projects become more sustainable. VuFind has agreed to partner with ITAV on beta testing of some of their tools and exercises, and this time slot was used as part of this test.
During this meeting, participants worked on the “We Can If…” activity; see also We Can If... Notes Document.
Highlights:
Challenge 1. Project leadership should be more distributed (bottleneck/succession issues)
Possible Actions:
- Communication plan related to fundraising which highlights the value of community participation/support
- Fundraising for increased project independence (realistically: very long term goal)
Challenge 2. Documentation can not be all things to all people; how do we balance keeping it evergreen vs. having very clear, specific examples?
Possible Actions:
- Investigate whether Dokuwiki contains a plug-in for alerting to old/potentially outdated pages.
- Investigate whether Dokuwiki contains a mechanism for page ownership, so people can “own” pages and be responsible for revisions, keeping things up to date, etc.
- Even if no automated mechanism exists, some of this could be done manually using pages listing other pages in need of attention and assigned owners.
- Form a group to develop a documentation maintenance policy.
- Gather analytics on usage of the wiki (add Matomo, etc.)
Challenge 3. Video editing tends to get backlogged
Possible Actions:
- Set up video editing project in GitHub.
- Column for pending work (with link to files)
- Column for in process (assign card to person)
- Solicit more volunteers if a system is prototyped and works well.
Challenge 4. Community call participation could be significantly higher
Possible Actions:
- Look at past attendees, reach out to occasional contributors to learn why they do not visit more frequently.
- Consider a survey about timing, content, etc.
- Marketing: clarify the purpose/content of the call; reassure users there is no obligation to do work
- Encourage users to visit the call to discuss support questions, feature suggestions, possible contributions, contribution process/value proposition, etc.
- New communication channels for advertising call? Not just listservs?
Challenge 5. There are relatively few technical contributors who contribute large amounts of code and who have a comprehensive understanding of the very large code base
Possible Actions:
- Reaching out to hosting companies during fundraising phase.
- “Good first issue” highlighting for onboarding; in conjunction with Hacktoberfest?
- Reach out to existing users to contribute their local features/fixes.
- Even consider looking at published forked code bases from other users to propose/request features.
- Develop a more comprehensive/official list of VuFind instances.
4. Other Topics?
None this month.
Next Call
The next call will be Tuesday, October 5, 2021 at 9am Eastern Daylight Time (13:00 GMT).