FOLIO Project Update – Week of June 17, 2019

The FOLIO Technical Council had several meetings at the FOLIO F2F event, primarily centered on Tech Debt and alignment with the Product Council. It presented its findings on Tech Debt to the Product Council.

The Consortia SIG held a “consortia implementers” workshop at the FOLIO F2F meeting (meeting notes). In the coming weeks, we’ll be working on a few follow-up activities: (1) codifying terminology around language related to multi-tenancy, (2) identifying/describing various tiers of resource sharing/ILL, (3) working on user stories and requirements for “unmediated cross-tenant borrowing”, and (4) discussing the LDP as it relates to consortia implementation models.

There were several Metadata Management SIG sessions at the FOLIO F2F meeting. They kicked off their capacity plan review process for Inventory (notes), talked about entity and identity management (notes), and ran an Inventory search bugfest for the Clover release. They also participated in cross-app discussions about Container records and met with the Reporting SIG.

The Sys Ops & Mgt SIG shared experiences and summaries of the FOLIO F2F meeting: They will use a container based reference deployment for FOLIO based on Kubernetes. This is where they will focus with documentation and “play books”. Dependency Resolution: they concluded that OKAPI should provide metadata via YAML for posting to Kubernetes and Rancher. Upgrading and updating: Cluster switching (blue/green upgrade pattern) will meet our requirements sufficiently. This is very high priority; it needs to happen very soon. Furthermore, they want to lower the barriers to entry and create a sandbox environment. Kubernetes might be too complex for this. It currently uses too much memory. Technical debt needs to be resolved as well. Main conclusions from Data Migration sessions:

  1. Need bulk API’s for loading data.
  2. MARC data is the most complex that needs to be mapped to the inventory data model.  The mapping currently can’t be easily modified.
  3. Matching records and maintaining relationships between barcodes, overlay, deltas, etc.

With some work, they can create a migration manual today, because lots of tools already exist. Bulk API’s are the only major issue but are planned to be upgraded ASAP.

The Community Outreach SIG reports that the face-to-face meeting had 87 attendees and the feedback was overall extremely positive. The community is looking forward to meeting again at WOLFcon. Outcomes for the Community Outreach SIG from the face-to-face meeting:

  1. Work with Darcy Brancini to promote PO and tester roles to current community members, including hosting a forum for perspective POs to hear about the role from current POs
  2. Promote the project to new developers to join the community
  3. Help create and share an onboarding process
  4. Work with Ian Walls (ByWater) on documentation
  5. Reach out to open source dev community
  6. Create a plan to promote the “wow” in the project including cool things that the platform currently does that other ILSs can’t/don’t do; we have a community-built platform; we are an international community
  7. Promote upcoming milestones: Chalmers, other implementations, etc.
  8. Join the implementers SIG
  9. Find ways to collaborate to take the info discussed in this SIG and push it out the community

ALA: The community hosted three events. The panel on Saturday morning, which had about 80 attendees went really well. The reception was well attended, and the community always looks forward to it. The panel on Sunday was with Jesse Koennekke, Kevin Kidd, Lynn Bailey and Andrew Nagy.