Updates on Community Sprint Planning / the "Islandora Event Planning" meeting

[Rosie Le Faive]

The open event planning meeting happened today. This is an open group that anybody in the Islandora community can join, and that is focused on stewarding both the community health discussions that will be happening in the monthly Islandora Open Meetings as well as monitoring progress on the current sprint planning (update on that below). It happens weekly on Fridays at 2pm Eastern. Email Kirsta.st...@utoronto.ca for an invite to this meeting. 

This email includes:

• A brief summary of today's meeting
• An announcement of Kirsta, Nat, and Rosie's roles in the upcoming community sprint

Summary of today's Event Planning Meeting:

• The issue cleanup was successful and ongoing issue maintenance will continue through the tech call

• Rosie and Kirsta will work on getting use cases into Github Issues (from various sources including the existing issue list)

• Jamboard will be processed,  as part of deciding how community discussions proceed. but we’re not sure how yet. .

• This call (Event Planning) will be weekly at 2pm Eastern on Fridays, no longer ‘ad hoc’

Full minutes for this and all Event Planning meetings are kept here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/17rR82Amx9EDaO0fm9uWlpL1sh2mHFXgve7k_bIw_eu8/edit# 

Sprint Planning for Islandora (2.x.x)

We are reaching out with an update about a community-driven sprint for the next release of Islandora (Drupal 9 version). Kirsta Stapelfeldt from UTSC and Rosie Le Faive (Islandora Committer) from UPEI have volunteered to work together over the end of 2021 to help organize, document, schedule and implement a community sprint. This work includes:

• Reconciling feedback from groups about the priorities for the sprint, and through discussion, documenting/reflecting that feedback. This feedback will appear as Github Issues so that a development “backlog” is as transparent as possible to all users of Islandora.  

• Helping to build consensus among users and developers on priorities for the sprint, including those with low interaction on Github, and also building consensus on issues of architecture that emerge throughout. 

• Calling for participation and communicating outcomes to ensure community engagement and awareness of the process. 

Natkeeran Ledchumykanthan from UTSC (Islandora 8 committer) would take on a role during the actual sprint of helping with technical aspects having to do with codebase/pull request management.

The scheduling and time period required for the sprint will emerge as a result of the ongoing deliberations, which will happen iteratively at the Tech call, Leadership, TAG, ICC, and other interest groups, including interest groups, meetings at which Rosie and Kirsta will have a constant presence over the next while. If your interest group does not have Rosie or Kirsta at it, and you would like to have that regular input into the sprint, write comm...@islandora.ca. 

What Rosie, Kirsta, and Nat are doing is not replacing our previous tech lead (Danny) nor our previous community manager (Melissa). We are trying to understand how a community-led model might strengthen the codebase and community, and providing short-term labour in service for the next sprint, to give community conversations about our collective direction a chance to unfold. 

This will enable us to collectively better understand what gaps need to be filled in a greater evolution of both the Islandora Foundation Staffing model, as well as the codebase, and documentation.