Meeting Minutes October 9, 2009
Plinkit Project Coordinators/Tech Group Meeting Minutes October 9, 2009
Roll Call
Tom Ceresini (Lyrasis), Steve Gregory (CO), Darci Hanning (OR), Sonya Norris (MI), Bev Obert (IL), Michael Sauers (NEBASE), Henry Stokes (TX) – minutes by Justine Shaffner (Collaborative Coordinator)
Approve 9/11 Joint Project Coordinators/Tech Group Meeting Minutes
No one had objections so these minutes are approved.
Status of Plinkit 2.0 work
Hanning said Plinkit 2.0 is mostly done (thanks Darci and Steve for all your hard work on this!) and we signed off on the last milestone after some furious testing. Gregory has found an issue with the calendar and Hanning found some issues with workflow in the Oregon migrations and with permissions for staff read-only items which we need to submit to Enfold. If folks want to do a dry run on the migration, we have documentation. If they need assistance during the process, schedule time with Gregory or Hanning so they can be available to help. As issues are resolved it should be a simple SVN update and zope restart to pick up the fixes.
Colorado can’t do their migration until the Calendar bug that Kreger discovered is fixed. On the Recurring Events User Interface, Enfold will start doing the code work next week. Kreger, Norris and Hanning will monitor this work which we hope to have done by mid-November. Sauers would like to get in the queue for the migration, which shouldn’t be too complicated for him. Hanning will work with him.
Hanning will do a write-up of known issues and work arounds and will get that out today. There’s a short term workaround for the calendar bug.
Obert said Brown will probably be contacting people for help with his migration.
a.Users’ manual
Hanning has a proposal for both the Users’ and Administrators’ Manual from Toni which she’ll go through and get out to us by Tuesday as she needs decisions from us. She’ll include her recommendation which will probably be that Toni does the User’s Manual and Hanning does the Administrators’ Manual which would leave us enough money to get the themes done too. All should respond to Hanning’s questions on the manual by 10/16. Shaffner sent a reminder today re Hanning’s email on the Manuals is coming and she must have our answers by next Friday.
Kreger put together a quick start guide for folks using the original version of Plinkit. 95% of the process is the same. There’s really nothing different that users have to do to keep using their sites.
SOW for Skins
Brown didn’t want to bug Hanning while she’s so busy with Plinkit 2.0, so will have something for us at the November meeting.
Approve Plone Boot Camp recommendation for Steering
Obert and Shaffner read it –
***Recommendation: A three (3) year training rotation, for one person from each member organization, should be implemented to further the education of the entire group. New organizations that join the collaborative will be allowed to send one person to Plone training when the need and schedules allow, ideally within 2 years of joining the collaborative. After initial training the new organization will be added to the three (3) year rotation.
We realize major migrations in the future of Plone may require additional training so that key contributors come up to a certain technical expertise with the new software, and the Steering Committee may be called upon to make a judgment about who can go.
Additionally, it is recommended that $1,000 of each member’s annual assessment be set aside for training. (i.e. $500 for normal training rotation at rate of $1500 reimbursement for training and $500 for extra ordinary training needs of the group such as an upgrade).
- and all attendees approved. Obert will take this to the Steering meeting in November.
Mentoring program
a.Need more mentors? (have Darci, Troy (Tech Group stuff) and Henry (PC stuff))
We’ll move forward with just these three mentors.
a.Need administrator/usher
This is someone who’ll give new members an overview of Plinkit and background on how things work. Since we probably won’t have new members this year, Obert very kindly agreed to do this until June 30, 2010. Shaffner will write something up about the program, get it approved by Obert, Norris, Brown, Stokes and Hanning and put it on the website and inform the listserv when it’s there. We’ll revisit the mentoring program at the end of the fiscal year to see how it’s going.
Status reports from each state
IL – Obert said nothing to report except they are sending bills to their 89 libraries with live sites. They’ll be pushing to get more libraries now that Plinkit 2.0 is done. They still have lots of people who are excited about it and so should have more movement in the next few months.
CO – Gregory said they are excited to move forward. They have several libraries that’ll start as soon as Plinkit 2.0 is in place. They’ve been working hard testing code and reporting bugs.
OR - Hanning has a clean instance of Plinkit 2.0 running and will bring new libraries up on that and has been working on migration stuff.
Lyrasis – Tom C. said they’ve submitted a proposal to Pennsylvania. It’s not an ideal time for PA to come on board as they have no state budget yet and are just waiting to hear on the cuts they know are coming.
TX – Stokes said not much new but they are excited about Plinkit 2.0. Lots of libraries are clamoring for training.
MI – Norris has formed the MI advisory committee for Plinkit. She’s working on staging libraries to come aboard. She has five informational visits to do in the next month.
NEBASE - Sauers said they are just waiting to migrate to Plinkit 2.0.
VA and INCOLSA – No attendees so no report.
Innovative things done by states – add to website
Norris did a JPEG showing all the new color schemes. Kreger did a cheat sheet of Plinkit 2.0 changes. Both are posted at the website and people find them very useful.
To Do list status
We’ve been too busy to do much of anything. Re the link check - Hanning said you can always update your state template to add the content you want so you don’t need to wait for the master template. The master template is really only useful for new members (who haven’t made any changes to its links), so it just needs to be updated before new members need to use it. Hanning said there are tricks to use a backend administrator interface to update it more quickly, but there’s no automated process (though she and Gregory discussed automating content updates). For existing sites, the individual library sites need to be updated. Each state could prepare a sheet for individual libraries to use to update their own pages. The problem is that once a library modifies the state template, if they just replace their page with the update from the state, all the links the library added themselves will be lost. Hanning said we’d like to eventually be able to do automated updates to entire pages. Since this really benefits new members only, hopefully they can do lots of the work on this.
Report on website contributions for the month
Shaffner added News entries on the DGAA award we won and on the press release re Plinkit upgraded to 2.0.
Do we like Go To Meeting?
Gregory likes it better than Wimba – it’s good audio quality and he didn’t have a problem with muting.
Hanning likes it as does Ceresini. Gregory said the url in Shaffner’s email wasn’t helpful, but he figured it out. This may have been because Gregory didn’t do the setup process in advance.
Other Business
Obert probably can’t attend the next meeting so will ask Brown to run it. Sauers will set up the recurring meeting and send the information to Shaffner. Obert will send the comments McKay’s heard about Drupal vs. Plone to the group.
Shaffner reminded the Technical Group they need to –
- Discuss the Enfold support contract and make a recommendation to Duncan re will this be needed after the current one runs out.
- Develop something that compares/contrasts (technically) Plone to Drupal and one or two other ‘leading’ content management systems.
Next meeting November 13, 2009 Friday - 11:30am Eastern Time, 10:30am Central Time, 9:30am Mountain Time and 8:30am Pacific Time
