2019-04-30 Meeting Minutes

(notes taken by Bobbi Fox)

-Email to Listserv re: tech docs repo

                -No responses so far;

-Emails to new members

  Alicia Detelich is working on a draft for an email pointing to technical documentation, etc.,  to new members, and will send it around after she's done.

-Email to new community engagement coordinator re: developer list

Alicia Detelich set email to Jessica Crouch, new community rep, asking to work with her to solicit input from developers; hasn't heard back yet.

-API documentation

Dave Mayo (Unlicensed) put in pull request.  Alicia Detelich has tested it out, but not merged.

      -Priorities – merge requests What do we want to prioritize?

  Dave Mayo (Unlicensed): there's one route in master that is already documented: (https://github.com/archivesspace/archivesspace/blob/master/backend/app/controllers/container.rb ) that was accidentally committed with a bug fix.  Thinks we may want to focus on batch functionality. 

   -Criteria for examples

Question of whether we should be using ArchivesSnake in examples, or just write them in straight python request format.  It might be best to write both, but Dave doesn't want to put  barrier in front of people who are doing the documenting,

  Alicia Detelich thinks we want to encourage ArchivesSnake usability. Bobbi points out that some environments won't support Python 3, and suggests at least a couple examples in straight python would be good.

Dave will experiment with this; he's committing initially that as a pull request that contains an ASnake version, he'll transcribe to the straight python.

Dave will write an email to post to the list about this effort, soliciting user input on what they want documented.

-Survey re: new programming – blog posts, videos, webinars, etc.

Alicia had sent out emails to listserv seeking different ways of informing people about tech. documentation.  She doesn't want to create things that people don't find useful. Could we work with Jessica to create a survey?  Laney McGlohon (Unlicensed) thinks we should centralize it with Jessica. Alicia notices that the developer screencasts are old.

Dave asks if there's a non-broken link to a discussion of the overview of the Aspace architecture?  The current link is a 404.  Alicia points to http://archivesspace.github.io/archivesspace/user/archivesspace-architecture-and-components/ , but Dave points out that this is useful, but doesn't seem to cover the entire application. Trevor shows that this page is duplicated here:https://github.com/archivesspace/tech-docs/tree/master/architecture

Laney can get the link fixed on the archivesspace.org site to point to the tech docs website.

-Data type formats

Mark Custer suggested creating documentation on why some data types are defined the way they are (e.g.: extension number is a string). Alicia asks whether anyone is around that has that knowledge. Dave thinks a more useful thing would be to describe how the fields are used now. Would like a deep description of model class.Where would that live? Dave suggests starting at the jsonmodel class level.

-Member forum presentation?

It would be good to have a lightning talk or short talk for outreach.  If Alicia is going to be there, she'd be happy to lead it. Dallas, if he goes, would be willing to help with that.

-Next meeting

Can we meet one more time before the next TAC meeting in June. Alicia will send out a meeting invite.

-Other business

Trevor Thornton says there are three open pull requests that he doesn't know enough about to merge them.  Would someone please look at them?