Meeting Minutes February 13, 2009

1st part of meeting – all - 45 minutes+

Roll Call
Troy Brown (IL), Steve Gregory (CO), Darci Hanning (OR), Kathleen Krause-Thompson (TX), Christine Kreger (CO), Jeff Humphrey (INCOLSA), Sonya Norris (MI), Bev Obert (IL), Michael Sauers (NEBASE), Rose Schooff (VA), Henry Stokes (TX) minutes by Justine Shaffner (Collaborative Coordinator)

Approve 1/9 Joint Project Coordinators/Tech Group Meeting Minutes
Stokes moved to approve the 1/9/09 meeting minutes, everyone said aye and no one was opposed, so the 1/9/09 minutes are approved.

Status of SOW for work on Plinkit 2.0
Gregory gave a big thanks to Shaffner for keeping the proposals coming and to everyone for their thoughtful evaluations.

a. Discuss SOW quotes
Gregory said that though the rankings are all over the place, the average scores come out very close, ranging from 67.4 to 76.7.  Humphrey he knocked down Enfold at least 20 points after seeing the new response re their post project cost, and he knocked 6 Feet Up down for being late since clear communication and promptness are important issues for him.

Gregory asked everyone what mattered to them in these proposals.  Krause-Thompson said she’s the only developer in the group and she feels that the end date isn’t as important as the implementation points so she rated Jazkarta high, but felt Cignex didn’t give enough time and underestimated cost, though this may be due to offshore labor.  Brown said on the form, the price is 25% so it weighs heavily on the overall score and that Enfold did better on their proposal if you don’t consider cost, even though he rated Cignex is higher, (but he felt both did well).  Brown also thought 6 Feet Up didn’t put much thought into their proposal.  Humphrey seconds this, especially considering the amount of extra time they had.  Brown said this may indicate they are too overwhelmed to handle our project.  Gregory likes 6 Feet Up’s resumes and said there’s quite a spread on prices. 

Gregory asked if any of the proposals contained red flags re trying to give us something different than what’s in the RFQ, e.g. Enfold says instead of a state template they’d use an import that wouldn’t expose it to the user.  Krause-Thompson said so it wouldn’t be an egg based product?  Hanning would like clarification on this.  Brown said Enfold addressed making changes to the template and saving it back so it can be brought back in, and that may be why they took this approach with the state template.  Hanning thinks this may be important if it’s a better way to go.  Gregory agrees since CO will upgrade their state templates at least once a year. 

Hanning wonders if perhaps she shouldn’t participate in the ranking since she knows these people, but her highest confidence goes to Enfold; on a technical level she likes their approach and thinks they could do one site at a time which gives flexibility.  She does think we’d be in good hands with any of them, but the two she’s least confident about are A Clark (since they have a lot on their plate and may be a little disorganized which could be stressful for some of us) and Cignex as their process worries her since we may have to work hard to clarify what we want.  Hanning also said that some of the schedules may be a bit aggressive for us since we can’t always respond very quickly e.g. 6 Feet Up has a 24 hour turnaround which will be hard for us to do.  Gregory thought maybe we could negotiate on that. 

We need clarification from Jazkarta on post product support, Gregory adjusted for it on the cost, but their proposal rubbed him the wrong way as he really dislikes some of the web site examples they use especially the Central MA system one and it seemed like they didn’t think some things through.  Brown agrees and said they are pushing their Amazon product too hard. 

Brown said none gave a good solution for CMFSin unless they plan to develop them further – maybe they’ll compromise and put everything in a portlet, otherwise they’ll have to rewrite this.  Hanning says Feedmixer doesn’t work the way we want for RSS feeds, so we’ll need to be really clear on our expectations with the winner re the RSS tool and write it into the contract, otherwise it’ll mix up all the news which won’t work, especially for the individual and state sites.

Gregory asked if there was anything else of concern re products or product substitutions.  Hanning thought everyone got it - they all seemed to have either downloaded Plinkit or looked at the demo site so they understand the issues.  She added that these folks are used to dealing with these issues when their customers migrate their sites.

Gregory asked if we should revise our evaluations after the meeting or wait until we have answers from Enfold and Jazkarta.  Krause-Thompson prefers to wait until after the three additional questions are answered and Obert agrees. 

Gregory noticed that A Clark recommends staying with CalendarX rather than moving to Plone for Artists.  Hanning said the downside to CalendarX is that it’s an old style product with property sheets that are generally no longer used.  They work, but they get harder and harder to maintain.  Obert said one vendor said the only reason to go to Plone for Artists is the recurring events, which is what we need it for!  Recurring events is a brand new feature in Plone for Artists, so we really need to make sure this works well enough in our final product.  Krause-Thompson asked if Auel (Jazkarta) manages the Plone for Artists group and Hanning said they have contributed a lot of products for it, since the artists/musicians audience needs it and that is a big market for Jazkarta.  Jazkarta will be the vendor most familiar with recurring events.  Gregory asked Hanning who she thought would handle recurring events best and she doesn’t have a feel for that but thinks all could do it well.

Gregory asked if it was standard that the payments on contracts are tied to deliverables because 6 Feet Up tied payments to benchmarks, but others did it using dates.  Hanning asked re how people felt re up front payments which isn’t unheard of but isn’t standard.  Cignex asks for 20% up front (which due to their low cost is less than A Clark asks for up front) and then goes to milestone payments.  A Clark asks for 10% up front.  Hanning and Gregory prefer payments being assigned to deliverables.

Stokes had to leave.

Shaffner will get answers to the three questions and send them on and will set up a meeting on 2/20/09 so we can discuss our revised evaluations in light of the answers to the three vendor questions.

Sauers needed to leave.

Skins
a. Which skins available for Plone 3.0 should we clean up and implement for our use?
b. Who’ll do the SOW for this skins work?
We decided to put this item off until next month.  Krause-Thompson has looked at many skins and isn’t sure which ones we can trust to update at a later date.  Hanning said good point - skins are like any product and have growing pains between versions, so even though they are CSS based, they have an HTML framework which can change.  Hanning is not super sure about the skins so thinks we should focus on the presentation piece and this SOW can include analysis of our choices so the vendor can tell us which ones may be problematic.  Everyone thought this was a good plan.

Report back to group on decisions & discussions at the Steering meeting – Bev and Steve
Obert said that the logo was the main discussion point and they’re voting on it via email and have been getting some new color options.  They also approved our new timeline and Obert is working with a group on future collaborative fees, which will be dependent on the SOW cost.  But the good news is we have plenty of money for this and she thinks we can keep fees at $8000 for the next couple of years.

Update on potential new members
Shaffner said she spoke to WA (Gary Bortel) and he said with their budget being such as it is now they can’t justify spending this kind of money for such a small number of libraries that need websites, but they’ll contact us if they change their minds in the future. 

Shaffner also said she spoke to Duncan re IA and they have a cautious interest in Plinkit.  He’ll speak to Mary Wegner at the BCR Board meeting later this month. 

She also said she’d reported on the other potentials last time and that they are all at a point where they’ll contact us if they are interested, or have someone contacting them directly e.g. PALINET and PA. 

Humphrey said re IN, INCOLSA is still waiting to hear from them (Piper contacted them) but that the IN State Library is focused on another project right now so hasn’t been able to be communicative on this.

Status reports from each state
OR – Hanning will try to upgrade the collaborative website to Plone 3.1 or 3.2 this weekend, so please avoid working on the website then.

MI – Norris said their RFP for hosting vendors is ready to go, but the State Library is being reorganized this week, so it may take some time to get the RFP out, but the delay due to Hanning’s website upgrade is welcome as it’ll give them time to get organized.

VA – Schooff is used to UNIX so didn’t want to wait for the upgrade before getting started with Plinkit.

INCOLSA – Humphrey said they are getting ready to launch a pilot project and he finished the proposal and will find out the time frame for everything next week.

CO - Kreger said Colorado launched the Carnegie Public Library in Trinidad website on February 6th, and is launching the Red Feather Lakes Community Library website on February 17th and she is reconnecting with libraries who had previously expressed an interest to see if they are still interested.

TX – Krause-Thompson said things are rocking along and she is looking forward to seeing how to classify machines (?) once the Plinkit 2.0 is released as she has lots of questions from her vendor which can’t get answered until the next version is out.

IL and NEBASE – No comments since we’re already running late.

PALINET – No attendee

Innovative things done by states – add to website
Obert said thanks to Brown for posting the marketing brochure which is a starting point for marketing Plinkit and letting people understand what it does.  It has blank space on the back for member organizations to put in contact information.

Oregon report on contribution to website for the month
Hanning will work on her January blog post on page layout options, content panels…  And she and Stokes are corresponding re an article on the next version of Plinkit for TX’s February contribution.

To Do list status
See below.

Are Tech Group/PCs sharing information at the website?
Yes, the proposals.

User's Manual - need point person
Hanning said this is not time critical but we’ll need someone to take the lead on both the themes and skins RFQ and on looking at the current User’s Manual to see what needs to be revised.  Hanning will be shepherding the Administrator’s Manual.  Gregory asked if anyone wants to volunteer for this.  Shaffner will add it to the next agenda.  Hanning said Tony Mantic did both manuals previously and could work on the next User’s Manual.  Mantic’s been to Plone Bootcamp so has a familiarity with Plone.  She’s an independent contractor.

Other Business
There being no other business, Gregory adjourned this part of the meeting.

2nd part of meeting – Technical Group Discussion – 45 minutes
See email summarizing this that Gregory sent 2/13/09 titled “Tech Group Discussion – Brief Minutes.”


Next Meetings –
Discuss the RFQ Responses on Friday February 20, 2009 from 2pm-3pm ET, 1pm-2pm CT, noon-1pm RM & 11am-noon PT
Next regular meeting - March 13, 2009 Friday - noon Eastern Time, 11 am Central Time, 10 am Mountain Time and 9 am Pacific Time


Plinkit Updated To Do list

Who                        What
All                            Pick two to three people that could be in a conference call in January where we could make some decisions about what the Users Advisory Council should do.  Shaffner has CO’s people only.

Gregory                   Write something new for the home page – whatever you like, but especially about who our intended audience is. 12/12 proposed text sent to list serv and comments made by Obert and Shaffner.  1/9 Gregory will resend with a one week due date.  DONE

INC/VA/NE/PAL     Look over the website and make suggestions about what needs to be made clearer and what needs to updated.

OR/TX/IL/CO         Look at your state sites and see if there is anything there that might be helpful at the collaborative site and send a list of those topics to Shaffner.

Shaffner                  Compile a list of helpful topics from the above item and send it to the list serv asking if they agree that all these things should be added to the collaborative site (as long as one person would like it at Plinkit.org, then it should be posted there). 

Hanning                   See if you can find information on how to fix the RSS feed for Plone 2.1 and let the list serv know about it one way or another.

Shaffner                   Email the list serv the date and time and how to connect to the Plone contractor teleconference in case anyone on the committee wants to sit in.  DONE

Obert                        Send marketing brochure to this listserv by the end of January for input, and to start group discussions re what additional marketing materials we should develop.   Brochure posted, need discussion on additional marketing materials.

Hanning                     Post the Plinkit Libraries location map at the Collaborative site after it’s upgraded to Plone 3.1.

All                              Look at the themes available for Plone 3.0 and decide on three you like and discuss on the list serv.  We can then make our final decision on which two to three themes to clean up and implement in two to three colors each at the February meeting, and decide who’ll write the SOW for this work.

All                              When Shaffner sends the suggested SOW evaluation form, be sure to give her your feedback. DONE

All                               After the quotes for the SOW are posted at the web site, be sure to complete the evaluation form by February 13 so you can discuss them at that meeting.  Now should read - after questions from three vendors are answered, review and revise your evaluation form and send new scores/ranking combined by member entity to Shaffner by 9am on 2/20/09.