2015-10-12 - First Meeting

Goals

• To start the group, discuss the group terms of reference and the scope, understanding what part all group members will play

Discussion items

Meeting Files

Meeting Minutes

Welcome and Apologies

Rory Davidson opened this first meeting of the Software Development Advisory Group and welcomed everyone. Brian Carlsen was not on the call.

Introductions

The group went through a round of introduction.

Regular Meeting Times

Rory Davidson asked whether 20 UTC was a good time for the regular meetings. He said he would send out another Doodle poll on that, but he would aim for the second week of every month.

Confluence

Rory Davidson introduced the group to the AG's Confluence space.

Scope and Purpose of the AG

Rory Davidson said the main reason for starting the AG was to exchange ideas on how to grow an open source community and how to put the right governance in place so that, as other bits of open source code are contributed, there is an appropriate governance structure. The AG would also get updates on the open source tools from IHTSDO and roadmaps. The agendas, Rory Davidson said, should be driven by the AG, not IHTSDO.

Rory Davidson then said that the AG should be the gatekeeper of any published APIs and documentation. The point of the Open Tooling Framework (OTF) was to have a set of APIs that could be managed so that implementations could be different behind the APIs. Even changes by IHTSDO would need to go through the API process. The AG would also focus on QA frameworks for open source code - metrics for determining whether or not it's good. How do we make sure that changes are the ones we want and will benefit the community?

• Rory Davidson suggested that the group look through the tooling roadmaps (see "SDAG slides" on the meeting page).

Rory Davidson asked the group to comment on the scope and purpose that he had outlined. Susan Castillo said she had expected that the AG would only focus on IHTSDO tooling, but she was content with the description Rory Davidson had given. Philip Wilford mentioned that FHIR had some interesting code that would be relevant to look at. Rory Davidson said FHIR was starting to get some real traction, and discussion about it that were relevant to terminology and tooling would be welcome.

Alejandro Lopez Osornio said he would be interested in the AG discussing ways of linking tools, some kind of standard so that tools could interact with one another. Rory Davidson agreed with that.

Rory Davidson then said that the first task of the group, at the next meeting, would be discussing how the group members see governance of an open source community. What are some best practices?

First Face-to-Face

Rory Davidson apologized for there not being a face-to-face in Uruguay at the end of the month, but he explained that the IHTSDO terminology server would be open sourced in January after new tooling going live in December. Quite a few people had been asking about when the terminology server would be open sourced, so IHTSDO wanted to get the governance in place pretty quickly. 

• Rory Davidson said he would send out an email about the first face-to-face meeting, likely to take place in the new year. 

IHTSDO, he said, would cover travel expenses.

There would be a software developers meeting in Uruguay, however, Rory Davidson noted. It would not be an AG meeting but rather a 90 to 120 minute session on October 27 at 17:30 local (Montevideo) time. AG members would be welcome to attend if they are at the conference, call in, or hear the recording afterwards. 

Closing and Adjournment

Rory Davidson said he anticipated that AG members in the future would be doing more of the talking and presenting.

Feikje Hielkema-Raadsveld asked if anything had been open sourced already. Rory Davidson said yes and pointed the group towards https://github.com/ihtsdo  

• AG members to review https://github.com/ihtsdo  before the next meeting.

One of the AG members said it would be good to get some metrics such as sonar reports close to the home pages of things so that potential users could determine whether they want to spend time on them. Rory Davidson agreed that that was a good point.

• Rory Davidson to look at putting some metrics (such as sonar reports) on the github site.

Rory Davidson thanked everyone and adjourned the meeting after about 45 minutes.