Participants

Agenda

1. Next generation platform technologies (update and handoff)
2. Improvements to communicating tech best practice and usage of particular product features 

Materials

TAG - Meadowlark Update - 2022-07-21.pdf

Notes

Topic 1 - Next generation platform technologies (Meadowlark)

Stephen presented update on Meadowlark starting with the reason why Meadowlark was originally conceived - to explore next generation modular, cloud forward technologies.

Stephen also provided an update on the next two milestones (0.2.0 and 0.3.0), their expected features and projected timeline for completion of 0.2.0.

• Discussion around the choice of NodeJS over Python or .NET
• Reiteration that Meadowlark IS NOT a project, still just a concept
  • The Alliance is interested in working with community to determine if we are on the right path toward a product.
• Discussion about the Meadowlark SIG and some of the feedback from that convening
• Ultimately feature parity is important, the community would not want to loose features to use if were to be productized.
• Document store is an intriguing concern, the multiple data standard support that it provides is a plus.
• Question was asked re: if using a document store, would it be possible to relax data standard validation requirements (i.e. importing imperfect data)
  • Stephen  - we hadn't considered that, currently it's strict validation against the model, but could envision the ability to relax the validation requirements as an option
• Meadowlark is close to ready for pilot implementations, possibly for the 2022-2023 school year
• Azure will most likely be the first cloud target. Meadowlark is meant to be cloud agnostic, but deployment scripts will look different between the big 3 and the majority of survey respondents are on Azure
  • Discussion re: MongoDB working differently on the different cloud providers, so be ready for that.
• In Stephen's overview he mentioned that for pilot we would target small to medium districts. Discussion on whether this was the ultimate target of Meadowlark. They are not, but thought is that if we can make it so that they could implement, the target implementations would be able to complete

Topic 2 - Improvements to communicating tech best practice and usage of particular product features

Question: Community members learn new things every week, how are these things communicated out to the community or how can they communicated such that not every member trying to implement has to start from scratch and struggle/learn things on their own or comb through TechDocs and tracker tickets to learn.

• Example given ODS/API page size limits - This setting was unknown or research/reaching out to the Alliance was required, can we make information like this easier to figure out
• Discussed a work in progress where some of this would be absorbed into the Ed-Fi Academy, which is meant for learning how the technology works
• Suggestion was presented to submit a tracker ticket when documentation is incorrect or missing, ticket will get routed to the correct person and documentation can be fixed/added.
• Another example was brought up - API composites - cool feature, but how does it work, as it stands, it would be a lot of trial and error to figure out, and many don't have that time
• Suggestion to find a way to get TechDocs/tracker/slack to work together (i.e. search across all forms)
• Can we make TechDocs more forum like?
  • Confluence does have a Q&A feature that is enabled on TechDocs, but no interest so far
• A lot of valuable information ends up in slack, but because of the free account status it gets lost quickly
  • The Alliance has looked into integrations that would send slack conversations to JIRA and other platforms