Agenda

Housekeeping
1. Welcome new TAG / handoff of coordination
2. Support experience, Community Hub, and Slack
Bulk API: summary and recap status
Open API specification version
Updating the Ed-Fi API guidance

Materials

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First Name	Last Name	Organization
Josh	Allen	Denver Public Schools
Josh	Bergman	Skyward
Dirk	Bradley	Michigan Datahub
David	Clements	Ed-Fi Alliance
Wyatt	Cothran	South Carolina Department of Education
Stephen	Fuqua	Ed-Fi Alliance
Gene	Garcia	Microsoft
Jean-Francois	Guertin	EdWire
Jason	Hoekstra	Ed-Fi Alliance
Matt	Hoffman	Aeries Software
Eric	Jansson	Ed-Fi Alliance
Sherod	Keen	Keen Logic
Vinaya	Mayya	Ed-Fi Alliance
Nadu	Nair	Walla Walla Pubic Schools
Oscar	Ortega	Edupoint
Andrew	Rice	Education Analytics
Lucy	Saura	Lake Washington School District
Rick	Thompson	South Carolina Department of Education

Support: Ann Su, Ed-Fi Alliance

Welcome new TAG members
Stephen Fuqua running the agenda in 2023
Support experience, Community Hub, and Slack
- TAG/GAT meeting post Tech Congress generated a request to move forward with paid Slack.
- Ed-Fi staff are analyzing Salesforce tools, where we recently moved support tickets, to see to what extent they can replace much of the use of Slack.
- Most likely we will end up with a hybrid situation, where staff, contractors, and governance participants (i.e. TAG) are invited into paid Slack accounts, and the generality of the community use the Salesforce Community features.

Vendors expressed possible support for the "synchronous batch" model, whereas there continues to be more pushback against the "asynchronous bulk" model of data interchange.
The simplest implementation would be a proxy service sitting in front of the ODS/API, but running in the same network segment.
- Pro: could use with any ODS/API implementation.
- Con: does not reduce the total number of network connections
  - Mitigating factor: but, most of the connections are on the same network segment and thus should have lower latency.
- Con: extra item to deploy
  - But if it works - that is, improves overall load times - then it would be worthwhile, say several API hosting providers.
- Can we build and test a prototype?
Most of the benefit for such a system would be during new implementations or start of a new year, when all school data need to be synched into the ODS/API at once.
Question about PATCH verb for partial updates: could make payloads smaller. But requires a lot of extra work on both the vendor and the API implementation. Right now PATCH is strongly discouraged in the Ed-Fi API Guidelines.
There is still a significant concern with vendors not optimizing their code.
- Multi-threading
- DELETE/POST instead of using PUT requests
  - Sidenote: for some, this strategy is just simpler to code because there is no need to have special logic for those resources that allow natural key updates.

No one identified any immediate concern with upgrading the Open API Specification, but it would be helpful to see it in action and provide feedback later.

Agreement to convene a special interest group for detailed guidance.
- Volunteers: Josh A, Josh B, Andrew / Rosh / Mark, Sherod, JF
Why? To provide clear guidance to:
- ODS/API - what is allowed to break?
- Meadowlark
- Vendor-hosted API instances / implementations