Monday April 10th: uPortal-home aka AngularJS-portal incubation check-in call

[Andrew Petro]

Apologies for the late notice.

Apereo-incubating "uPortal-home" aka "AngularJS-portal" will be holding an incubation status check-in open call on Monday (tomorrow) with its incubation mentors (Ian Dolphin and Benito Gonzalez).

1pm US Eastern (New York City).

Apereo Big Blue Button, room 1, the ever-so-secret password is "apereo".

Agenda, which is wide open for comment and suggestion.

The intent of making this an open call is to use the call to both work the incubation process towards meeting the exit criteria and to also use the call to improve openness and transparency, to build community even. Towards that end - everyone is very welcome to join the call, and the agenda is structured to provide context, to ensure that we do hit the incubation progress and next steps items hard, and to afford a time and place for other related conversations.

Sorry for the late notice. Will definitely post notes after. If nothing else this call serves as a practice run for using incubation status check-ins in this way, and we'll do the next one better.

Looking forward to talking "uPortal-home" progress, both at this call and otherwise,

-Andrew

[Andrew Petro]

Save the date: the next uPortal-home aka AngularJS-portal incubation check-in call is tentatively scheduled for Thursday May 25th at 10am NYC. I anticipate that too will be an open-to-participation, recording-and-notes available call.

As for this April 10th call: it happened. I appreciate a couple uPortal community members joining.

An audio recording is now available. It's easier to understand juxtaposed with the agenda document, which mostly transformed into call notes in the course of the call.

Some highlights:

• Christian Murphy's excellent contributions to the project around code quality and code quality checking automation. These contributions are independently valuable, they are especially aligned with incubation, and they are meta-valuable in that they constitute progress in widening the collaboration on this software beyond its historical principals.
• Valuing Incubation both for its direct benefits (clarity, the cleanliness of verifiably completing the exit criteria, Apereo affiliation, ...) and for hoped-for side effects (picking up additional adopters, project participants, collaborators). Gaining that "sponsored project" badge as such isn't the only goal -- it is very much the goal to build community in the course of earning that badge. There's interest in navigating tradeoffs between incubation and other velocity and taking the time to build community.
• Expecting to make licensing, committership, etc. squeaky clean by the time of the May 25 call so as to reach that call feeling ready to move the GitHub repos to a uPortal-project-flavored GitHub organization out of the currently used UW-Madison-DoIT-flavored GitHub organization. Hoping to confirm that readiness through the call and then execute on the move going into the Open Apereo 2017 conference. There seem to be some potential adopters or participants who would greatly value the clarity of this repo move: we've heard that feedback and are prioritizing this move, but are trying to also use the moment of the move to make a clean break and bring along as little baggage as feasible.
• Roughly anticipating (successfully!) exiting incubation sometime between the 2017 and 2018 Open Apereo conferences. (This is a goal, not a guarantee.)
• Intentions to upgrade AngularJS version beyond the currently used v1 to "latest". (AngularJS versioning has gotten semantic, so technically it'd be something like AngularJS v5, but if you think of that as "v2" in relation to current "v1" you've got the right idea.) Expect R&D on this this quarter but not actually making the jump until calendar Q3 or even later.
• Strong desire for and welcoming of additional adopters, project participants, collaborators.

I'll be updating the formal incubation record in OAE to reflect, presently, and then there will be some website tweaking to post the link to that as well.

-Andrew

PS: Reviewing the recording, some obvious-in-retrospect lessons I'm taking from it: take more care to introduce speakers perhaps the first time they speak; read aloud the chat comments; and possibly learn to be more careful with the insider jokes and references. That last bit is nuanced in that some of that stuff is a little of the culture, the glue that brings us together in our projects, but it's also a barrier to entry, off-putting to newcomers. I'll try to be more thoughtful about it in future opportunities.

PPS: I'm not entirely thrilled about that use of SoundCloud to host this audio -- it's got some not-ideal details in its binding to my name and my UW-Madison Google account. But it seems Good Enough: the half-life of value of that recording is relatively short and it didn't seem worth blocking progress on figuring out how to host and archive audio better.  Realistically, if SoundCloud were to disappear in a year or two and thus that recording disappears from the Web, no one will care.