Meeting Minutes April 9, 2009

1st part of meeting – all - 45 minutes


Roll Call
Steve Gregory (CO), Darci Hanning (OR), Kathleen Krause-Thompson (TX), Christine Kreger (CO), Jeff Humphrey (INCOLSA), Sonya Norris (MI), Bev Obert (IL), minutes by Justine Shaffner (Collaborative Coordinator)


Approve 3/13 Joint Project Coordinators/Tech Group Meeting Minutes
Obert asked if anyone had objections or changes to the minutes, no one did, Norris motioned to approve, Hanning seconded, no one objected, so minutes are approved.  Gregory asked if in future we could just ask if anyone had objections or changes to the minutes and if no one does, we can consider them approved.


Report back to group on decisions and discussions at Steering Meeting – Bev & Steve
The Steering Committee agreed with our selection of Enfold as the vendor and will be hands off with this work.  The membership fee next year should be $8000.  The Steering Committee is discussing if we should trademark the name Plinkit since Michigan’s lawyer recommended we do this.  Obert also mentioned trademarking the logo.   We have an official logo in black and white and we have some various colors to use, or we can use our own colors. 


Status of Plinkit 2.0 work – Darci, Steve and others
Folks are sending Data.fs files to Enfold.  Enfold has completed the migration from Plone 2.x to Plone 3.x using Colorado’s Data.fs file.  Gregory and Hanning told Enfold that if any add-on products are confusing or problematic, Enfold should check with them before proceeding with them.  The newer states have been asked to limit themselves to installing existing Plinkit products only (if there’s something they really want to add, bring it to this group for discussion before installing it).  Gregory said the work is 10% done and Enfold has used just 9% of the hours allocated to the project.

Hanning will post Enfold’s status reports on the website before the status meeting and will email the group when the report is there.  Gregory added that if anyone’s having difficulty getting requested items to Enfold, stick around to discuss this in the Technical Group portion of the meeting.


SOW for Skins – Troy & Christine
a.    Update
b.    Which skins available for Plone 3.0 should we clean up and implement for our use?
Kreger should not be listed here.  No work has been done as far as we know.  Re looking at skins Hanning has responses from herself, Sauers, Norris and Shaffner only.  See the link to this on the To Do list.


Decide on meeting dates/times for 7/09-6/10
Shaffner will send an email checking if the current date and time is okay with everyone, if it’s not, she’ll ask for bad days and times from all and use that information for a poll to determine a new day and time for our regular meeting 7/09-6/10 meetings.


Discussion about Plinkit community advisory group meetings – Bev
Obert will send an email about this.  She really needs some names from Oregon, INCOLSA, and Texas as these are the only states that actually have users (and she already has names for Colorado and Illinois).  She’s thinking of having two meetings a year by conference call.  She thinks the group’s purpose would be to give feedback on Plinkit regarding what they like, what they’d like to see added, what’s hard for them to do etc.   She’d like to set up a meeting by 7/1/09.  Shaffner thought the group might also be the place where any Plinkit user could give feedback to their state/organization’s representative on the group and Obert agreed with this.


Discussion about Plinkit community usability feedback – Bev
Hanning thinks this is about testing the usability of the Plinkit websites.  This should be part of the skins work so will be added as item c there.  Norris asked that we add a 508 compliancy check to this item.  This will happen after the Enfold work is done but before the skins work starts.

Humphrey joined the call.


Discussion about Plinkit marketing materials for libraries – Bev
The brochure is great and people are just starting to develop their marketing plans, so no one has any requests for marketing materials yet.  We think there’s a 3 minute video re how easy it is to use Plinkit see http://www.illinoisplinkit.org/help-center/tutorial/video-1-editing-pages   We decided to put this discussion off until Fall 2009 (after Plinkit 2.0 is up and running).


How we tell Plone community what we’re doing and how to give back to them – Hanning
Hanning said we can give time and effort and we can fund things.  For open source communities, it’s important to be willing to share new things we’ve done that may be useful to them.  We can also test new releases of Plone and report back on bugs.  We might also fund a product developer to do new code (e.g. if we have some work done on recurring events we could then pay the developer to make the code part of Plone).  We can do sponsorships at the annual Plone conference, which will help keep the cost down for attendees, plus it’s a great advertising opportunity.   We can sponsor “sprints” (several times a year Plone developers will get together and code madly for 3-5 days and will then report back on what they accomplished) or we could help with travel and lodging etc. for them.  Often you contribute to a sprint where the code might directly benefit your product.  We could write documentation that would be beneficial to the Plone community.  Or we could support the community in other ways – e.g. Hanning sent an email to the Steering Committee to help ZEA Partners (they vet Zope and Plone consultants and pair them up with clients) in their quest for a grant for 3 million euros.  As part of the grant, they need to show the impact of Plone and so we’ve signed on as an organization in support of them and we could write a letter of recommendation/support for their grant.  Hanning’s just waiting for two Steering members to respond.

She encourages us to do what we can to help the Plone community as they help us so much, plus are an incredibly friendly group of people.

Gregory thought maybe we could organize a sprint for theming, especially the technical side of it.  Hanning said we could go to a site like http://www.oswd.org/ to get the graphical stuff and then we could add the technical stuff at the sprint

Kreger joined the call.

Hanning and Gregory will see about organizing a sprint on theming.


Update on potential new members
Shaffner said there was nothing to report as nothing has been done with Iowa yet and they are the only outstanding possibility on our radar.


Status reports from each state
INCOLSA – Humphrey said they are actively in their pilot project and are working with three libraries.  The most recent library already uses Plone for their intranet.  Their technical person wants to develop some skins, which Humphrey said would be great but should wait until after the upgrade.  They’ll give the pilot sites a month or so at least before they start actively marketing Plinkit to other libraries.  He’s disappointed that the Indiana State Library has decided to go with another CMS (he thinks it’s Access Point), but said at least our product was developed for libraries specifically.  He’s talking about Plinkit soon at a district meeting in the western part of the state, which is a densely populated area.  Obert said don’t let the state library’s decision alarm you as in Illinois a system that was going to work with their group decided to go with Drupal and their product looks very much like a Plinkit site.

Library of Michigan – Norris said they are still in the marketing phase and she has her first presentation in two weeks.  Proposals are due back from vendors by 4/15.  They hope to go live next winter, so they still have the same timeline.

TX – Krause-Thompson said they have some technical difficulties right now.  Their server is back up, but they are almost out of space on their Plone Data.fs files.  They’ve had some new libraries come aboard and Stokes has done some training with them.

CO – Kreger said they are actively working on websites for Lamar and Ouray and have another signed contract and one more coming soon but these last two will wait until after the migration.

OR – Hanning said they had their statewide conference last week and a couple of libraries are interested so may come in before the upgrade.

IL – Obert said nothing much new, though Brown is doing some advanced training.  They’ll get all the trainers together and let them know what’s going on with Plinkit 2.0 and Troy will then train them on the advanced work he’s doing.  After the upgrade they’ll do another push (a poster session at the Illinois Library Association conference in the fall).

No attendees from NEBASE, PALINET or the Library of Virginia, so no reports from them.


Innovative things done by states – add to website
We skipped this as we’re all too busy to have added anything.


Oregon, Illinois and Colorado report on contributions to website for the month
Shaffner mentioned she forgot to report last month that Stokes did his February blog post on Plinkit 2.0 – A New Phase – Coming Soon.   Hanning did her post on Content Panels and will send documentation on this but she needs to find it first.


To Do list status
Gregory asked that when Shaffner posts the minutes she makes the TO DO list a “related item” rather than putting it at the end of the minutes as she’d been doing.


Are Tech Group/PCs sharing information at the website?
The group decided to take this off the agenda until a future date.  Shaffner will see if it should be added again for the October agenda.


Other Business
We tried a Skype conference call at the weekly status meeting, so we’ll send an email and poll around re trying to use Skype at future PC/Tech Group meetings.  Humphrey said it works great until you have seven or more people on it (so don’t cancel the conference call reservation as we may need it if Skype doesn’t work out) but that this could also depend on the time of day you’re using it.  Hanning wondered if they’re using the latest version of Skype.  Humphrey said the new version isn’t super user friendly so he reverted to the older version.

Next Meeting – May 8, 2009 Friday - noon Eastern Time, 11 am Central Time, 10 am Mountain Time and 9 am Pacific Time

2nd part of meeting – Technical Group Discussion – 45 minutes