EG Web Team 8/18/10 Meeting Minutes

Participants: Jim Craner (project leader), Amy Terlaga, Lori Ayre, June Rayner, Anoop Atre, Chris Sharp, Elizabeth McKinney, Jason Etheridge, Dan Scott

Goal was to meet with those who had or currently have responsibility for Evergreen website.

Jason: Evergreen-ils.org established early on like any other open source software website with a mailing list, down load links, documentation, etc.

Dan: It has been a free-for-all since the early days. When someone requested an addition to the website, it was generally accommodated. Anyone can add get a wiki account now.

Dan: principles that are important to keep in mind going forward

1. redesign necessary - we need to rethink the face we are putting foward 
2. the content is generally available 
3. it must continue to be open and easy for people to contribute 

Jason: also keep in mind this is now a global community. Also, we want to ensure that hijacking of the website by anyone is not possible (e.g. like what happened with koha.org)

Jim:

1. Understands that an open, transparent process is important 
2. Glad to hear everyone agrees an overhaul is necessary 
3. Will be focusing will be on info architecture 
4. Will do a content census so we know what content is there and whether it is current 
5. Will develop requirements for the different user groups that form the EG community 

Discussion about servers and housing the website. Chris and Elizabeth state that GA PINES is currently hosting the website and can continue to do so as long as necessary but the goal is to turn over the site to the community. Ideally, the outcome of the Governance Committee would be to establish a funding mechanism so that website could be hosted independently. Also note that PINES will be migrating off their servers in 6-9 months.

Discussion of user groups:

1. Need to make contact with people from Documentation Interest Group (Karen Collier) 
2. Need to have new Developers and long-time developers. Thomas Berezansky(MVLC) and Jeff Godin (Traverse District) mentioned. Also Dan and Jason will continue to be available as needed. Anoop is a good contact for Web Team because he is a very new developer. 

Discussion of some of the pieces that need to be sorted out: Launchpad, User support forums, Wish List/New Evergreen Features, Developer Roadmap, KCLS Features. Jim stated that developers need to figure out the pathways they want to establish for having the rest of the community get to them and then we should build a website to support that.

Currently four access points to developers:

1. Developer's Mailing List
2. Launchpad (currently used primarily for translations and bug reports, and not version control) 
3. IRC channel 
4. SVN-Commit 

For internal record-keeping, some developers use use wikis, some use GitHub, some use Launchpad.   Note about VN-Commit server, this is one of two servers hosted at PINES. Subversion contains the main code. There is also a demo server there.

Discussion of how developers decide what gets rolled into official Evergreen product. Currently an informal system based on trusted relationships between a core group of developers. No release manager.

More discussion about integration between User community and Developer community:

1. There is currently a "How to join the developer community" resource that is very useful 
2. Need to learn more about documentation repository & process 
3. How to capture feature requests 
4. Usefulness of developer roadmap (Dan: probably should get rid of it) 
5. How to support multi-org collaboration for development 

 Another meeting will be scheduled between Web Team and Developers to further tease out their needs and how the interface between developers and the rest of the community needs to work.