TAG Meeting 2022-05-19

Participants

Agenda

1. Introductions

2. Meeting Norms

3. TAG Priorities

4. Certification/Vendor Asks

Notes

See slides for topics 1-2 from agenda.

The main topic was item #4 (item #3 was skipped/held for the future).

General feedback was that – at a high level – the general direction was positive. TAG members made a number of additions and refinements (some which may fit into the broad categorizations of the directions proposed.  These included:

• More clear recommend single-year deployment models for the API and ODS

• On availability, should collect if the Ed-Fi data service has fees or not

• Vendors need more guidance with initial implementation work and basics of the data model

• More details on vendor integrations would be helpful, to help address integration issues found in the field.

A primary point of discussion was on the grounding certification in use cases. There was some concern over the notion of making certification more "use case focused", as there seemed to be concern that it could introduce ambiguity. It was clarified that the purpose of the use case focus would be to provide logic to the selection of data elements and other normative rules that are part of the API contract, and not to allow ambiguity in what data elements are delivered (i.e., testing would not be "can you meet this use case?" but "can you provide data elements A, B, C" and --if needed – "according to rules X, Y, Z").

A use-case focus was still regarded as a point of possible confusion, but also as a means of providing more clarity. The general sense seemed to be that there was a balancing act here, and it needed to be approached carefully.

Other notes/suggestions

• Alliance should recommend analytics are not driven off of database access but use API.

• Versioning of various endpoints or domains was suggested as a means of clarifying vendor expectations, especially across versions

• The possibility of "tiers" of certification based on number of integrations was also proposed

Materials