2022-10-06 TAC/UAC Coordinating Committee

20 min

Checking in

• Thoughts on workplans

All

The Council leaders met to review the workplans and one of the ideas that emerged was re-framing collaboration as “information pathways” and exploring what already exists and what does not: Council Information Pathways . (Valerie will snapshot this visualization and update it over time) These pathways should help with the goal of establishing better continuity across terms and it will be exciting to develop new relationships.

UAC had a leader meeting and will probably have another in the spring (there wasn’t a lot of enthusiasm for adding another standing meeting).

A question came up about how a team would connect to the Board if they had something to present or discuss. The quarterly reports to the Board are the primary mechanism currently, but Gordon said he’s willing to get additional reports or otherwise take items for consideration for the full Board.

Questions have come up in both Councils on the usual timing for the roadmap and its alignment with term

• We discussed ideal meeting reality and how with a small team reality often forces the roadmap process into something that is less-than-ideal. The goal is to have a process that reflects community wants (including predictable timelines and advance notice of projects/releases) and is sustainable.

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While program team members participate in the work of many of the sub-teams, their participation has not been formalized in most cases. (There was a time that at least one program team member attended every meeting of every sub-team, but this tended to have an effect on participation of the actual group members.) These relationships should be documented and the expectations made clear. The current relationships are:

• Development Prioritization - Program Manager and Tech Lead or other member of the development team attend meetings

• Integrations - program team not usually involved, though Program Manager served on the team last term due to turnover in membership

• Member Engagement - Community Engagement Coordinator attends meeting/actively participates in team

• Metadata Standards - Program Manager was involved in its formative terms, but not currently; would be good to be more involved again

• Tech Docs - usually one or more members of the development team attend meetings and participate in maintenance of the docs; currently two members of the LYRASIS tech team are in this role

• Testing - hasn’t had many meetings in the past, but Program Manager has a lot of contact with the group in providing and responding to testing

• Usability - some Program Manager involvement by attending one or more meetings per term at the request of the group; possibility of involvement of new Front End Developer

• User Docs - Community Engagement Coordinator/actively participates in team

10 min

Debrief from the mixer

All

• Consensus was that it was a good, fun event and we’d like to repeat it later in the term. The format worked well and maybe the only change would be to have people go around and introduce themselves. Vice Chairs will consider taking it planning another mixer for some time after January.

10 min

Live training session from LYRASIS

All

We still have this as an option for this term, but if we’re going to do it we should pick a topic and date soon.

• There continues to be a lack of enthusiasm for the original vision of this program. There is enthusiasm for the types of technical training mentioned in the last meeting. We will explore some different mechanisms for providing it and Christine will see if the (small amount of) financial resources allocated to the pilot can be redirected to help make some tech training happen.

• Valerie wants to work with Joshua Shaw on “Docker for the Rest of Us” to empower councils and the community to launch local test servers post-3.2.0. This would be a goal for the end of term.

• What about a lightweight skill share, rather than full training, in some cases? People could share some specific things they know in a relatively casual forum, with the idea that attendees could take away a specific skill from the session. This could be just for TAC/Councils or for the whole community.

  • “Clusters” of presenters - pairing a more seasoned presenter with a less experience one - might make this a less intimidating prospect for some people

• Pathway to Core Committers ideas from Regine

We will continue to discuss these and other ideas and return to the topic in our November meeting.

5 min

Anything else?

Gordon has submitted the item about Vice Chair participation in the Nominating Committee process to the Board for consideration at its November meeting.

Christine checked with Maggie Hughes, one of the TAC originators of the Awesome list about procedures and she doesn’t have anything that’s not already on the list itself or in Confluence. She’s available for questions, though, if you want to ask her anything while working up more formal procedures and processes.

For Nominating Committee, 2022-23 edition: Consider adding a way for people to indicate specific areas of expertise on the nomination form, maybe something structured and easy like a series of checkboxes.