Meeting Minutes August 15, 2008

Roll Call –

Christopher Adams, Troy Brown, Holly Gordon, Steve Gregory, Jeff Humphrey from INCOLSA, Kathleen Krause-Thompson, Sharon Morris, Bev Obert, Tine Walczyk – minutes taken by Justine Shaffner

Approve 6/29 ALA Meeting Minutes and 7/7 Project Coordinators/Tech Group Meeting Minutes –

Gregory said he thought the minutes were okay, Brown moved to accept the minutes from both meetings, Morris seconded, all approved. Both set of minutes will be published at the website.

Introduce Chris (Darci’s new hire) –

Adams introduced himself.  He’s the head of IT at the OR State Library and is involved in providing part time support to the Plinkit community.  He just attended the Plone boot camp in Seattle.  Walczyk said TX will be introducing Henry Stokes at the next meeting as he will be taking on Plinkit Project Coordinator duties as she will be leaving the state agency to pursue her Ph.D.

Status of Statement of Work (SOW) for work on Plinkit 2.0 –

Per Darci Hanning’s 8/14 email to Shaffner, the SOW is close to completion and should be ready for a final read/once-over by the middle of next week and out to vendors by the end of next week.  Brown wondered if we ever got recommendations from Joel Burton of consultants that would be appropriate for our project.  Obert thinks Hanning has some names, but the big factor is who can do it within the time frame we specify.  Shaffner will ask Hanning about this and will let the Plinkittech list serv know what she says.  Obert said everyone’s been doing a great job reading through the SOW and giving feedback.  She added that when everyone gets the SOW for the final once-over next week they should give Hanning the final feedback as quickly as possible.

Status of INCOLSA’s participation -

Gregory asked about the status of INCOLSA’s participation.  Humphrey said per his director they’ve submitted the formal application and are slowly putting their Plinkit team together.  Humphrey will be the Project Coordinator and will also be involved with the technical aspect of Plinkit.  They have a server ordered for their installation and potential hosting of Plinkit.  Plone’s been loaded on one of their servers so they’ll have a chance to work with it before going forward with Plinkit.  Brown told Humphrey he’d be happy to answer any questions and help out in any way.

Update the Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) for new member organizations -

Gregory thought the MOU didn’t cover adding more partners.  Shaffner will send MOU to the Project Coordinators who’ll look it over and send their comments back to her.  Shaffner will organize all the suggestions and then send them to the Steering Committee.

Discuss a strategic plan for the Plinkit Collaborative -

(Note - At the last Steering Committee meeting, Jim Scheppke said that the closest thing we have to a strategic plan is the addendum to the MOU which deals with expected use of funds (which are really objectives of what to accomplish), but that lots of these have been removed so this needs to be done.)

Morris felt that whatever plan we come up with we need to have timelines in place.  So we need to do a strategic plan but also need a project plan timeline.

Obert said everyone should send Shaffner things they’d like to see done and the date they’d like to see it by.  Shaffner will organize the information and send it to the list serv by the next meeting on September 12 so the project plan timeline can be discussed and put into a document can be sent to the Jim Duncan for review prior to the 9/19 Steering Committee meeting.  Eventually it will be incorporated into the strategic plan that’s being developed.

Walczyk would love to give us some parting thoughts.  Shaffner will send the list serv the addendum to the MOU for review and comment on by the next meeting.  Send comments to the entire list serv.  Shaffner will organize the information and send it to the list serv by the next meeting on September 12 so the strategic plan can be discussed and put into a document can be sent to Duncan for review prior to the 9/19 Steering Committee meeting.  Obert would like to have it include marketing to other states and more about going out to conferences and talking to potential Plinkit partners.  Morris said this sounds great.

Reschedule 10/10 meeting as Plinkit Project Coordinator can’t take minutes? -

The meeting has been rescheduled to the October 9^th.  Gordon wants virtual cake since it’s near her birthday.

Status reports from each state -

TX – Walczyk said they did two more rounds of training this week.  Nine people were trained on Tuesday and fifteen were trained on Thursday.  At least ten or twelve active sites should come of this training.  Also, they are getting the new Plinkit person.  Per Gordon their server is under configured.  It has a memory problem.  Brown asked about the memory as Linux has a weird way of reporting memory so it may be misleading.   It automatically caches things that are used frequently, so there are a few things to look at.  Running Zope Enterprise Objects (ZEO) will definitely help

IL – Brown asked how many IL Plinkit sites are now live.  Obert thought they had around 80 sites as they had a big push around the fiscal year end but are close to 90 sites now. Brown said going to the boot camp in NC really helped him get more comfortable with Plone and he’s rewriting the Shawnee Library System’s website in Plone 3.14 and has found that managing portlets and other features really works better in Plone 3.14 so he’s really excited about upgrading.  He’d like to work closely with anyone in the Collaborative who is working on upgrading it to Plinkit 2.0, but he’s not a programmer.  He has a colleague named Ryan who is a programmer and is interested in Plone, so could be helpful, though Ryan may not have the time.  Brown feels he has a good grasp on HTML after reading Head First HTML with CSS & XHTML by Elisabeth and Eric Freeman (O’Reilly Media, Inc) which is excellent - really helpful and humorous too.  It’s not the usual super technical O’Reilly book though it gets into building websites from scratch.  IL is still bringing websites up, but since the grant is officially over the pace has slowed down a bit.  Per Obert they want to get everyone on a list serv so they can communicate better and get good MOU’s in place…   They are doing more of the administrative work now.  IL has regions and they’ve asked the regions if they want to participate in Plinkit.  There’s a technician for each region who brings in new people, trains them… with varying levels of expertise.  Brown acts as the head technician and does the back end work to get the sites set up.  They are trying to get all the tech people together via conference calls.

OR - Chris wasn’t really prepared to give a report but he knows they have thirty libraries live and ten more waiting to come up.  He’s new to Plinkit and only a small part of his time is dedicated to Plinkit support, so the Plone boot camp was quite an introduction.  He agrees that Head First HTML with CSS & XHTML is great.  They are rebuilding a new instance of the new version of Plone on a difference server so they have a chance to work with it.

CO – Until they get the new person to handle Plinkit it’s status quo.  Roughly 21 libraries are live all over the state.  They do a lot of customization of the look and feel so it takes them more time to bring a site up.  They added the Return on Investment (ROI) calculator w/ Colorado data and that’s been very popular.  They’ve uploaded videos to YouTube and put them on the CO website and are doing maps and are thinking of incorporating Meebo as an add-on.  Per Brown, if it’s done in the template (within the Custom folder – there’s one in there for Google Search and Search Your Catalog) and you paste in the raw HTML it works perfectly.  When he tries to do it as a page it never works right.  No libraries are using it in IL.  Per Walczyk, they didn’t put Meebo in as a portlet, but did it as a url and they have some libraries that have it and love it.  Gregory said he was at the NC Plone boot camp and found it very stimulating and informative.  He’s worked with Plone for several months now and has been going through all the books and online documentation, but the boot camp really increased his understanding and he recommends it for anyone getting started with Plone

INCOLSA – Humphrey said he had nothing to add beyond what he reported above.

Innovative things done by states – add to website -

Brown will put information on Meebo as an add-on in the Resources section of the website.

Gregory will put information on CO’s ROI calculator as an add-on in the Resources section of the website.

Walczyk asked if it would be helpful to put training examples up.  Morris and Gregory agreed that any training resources would be helpful.  They should go under Resources, then For Project Coordinators, then Training Materials.

States report on contributions to website since last meeting -

Obert tried to put something on the blog from Library Journal about keeping your website current but ended up adding a new page as a link directly under Navigation.  Shaffner will put it under the blog.  Most people are confused about the blog as some people can’t get into the blog to edit it and others can edit but not see it.  Many people seem to have inadequate privileges and would also like some basic blog training.  Also, it looks like there are two blogs – a testing blog and the regular blog.  Shaffner will ask Hanning for clarification of the use of the two blogs and to make sure everyone on the list serv has privileges to see and edit both the blogs and will announce to the listserv when their privileges are given.  She’ll also ask Hanning to provide some basic blog training for everyone.  Until then the Tech people can’t fulfill the need to add stuff to the blog monthly.

Morris had to leave early for another meeting.

Other Business -

Shaffner reported that she and Hanning will attend the August 21 meeting with Virginia re the possibility of their joining Plinkit.

Obert reminded everyone that the MOU, strategic plan and project timeline materials should be reviewed and feedback give to the listserv or Shaffner and Obert by the 9/12 meeting.

Obert reminded everyone that the next meeting will be at the same time on September 12, 2008.

The meeting was adjourned.