[openspending-dev] Dev meeting: January 9, 2014

Tue Jan 7 11:08:16 UTC 2014

Hi all,

Last week I asked if we could move our monthly developer meeting to the
second Thursday, January 9 (in two days). Nobody objected so we're going
ahead with that. We'll stick, as usual, to the 14 GMT time and the
#openspending IRC channel.

# Meeting agenda

Last meeting was mostly about bureaucracy. This meeting will be about
development contributions that don't involve coding (not all of them,
just two of many ways).

1. OpenSpending ecosystem
    * Last month there was a a lot of discussion about OS-Upload
    * Some confusion about whether OS-Upload should be standalone or not
    * Let's finish that discussion
    * Let's also decide if we want an ecosystem of tools or as few tools
as possible
2. D3 in OpenSpendingJS
    * Our community works a lot with D3 but OpenSpending doesn't use it
    * Time to move from browser compatibility to community compatibility?

# Results from the last meeting

We talked about a lot of stuff in the December developer meeting.
Probably too much because the meeting got stretched well into the next
hour (we need to try to keep our time limit).

We discussed our current documentation situation. We have three
documents conceptually. One is developer documentation, mostly about how
to install OpenSpending. One is the power user documentation, mostly
about API use and other functionality. The third one is more general
documentation about how to contribute data.

The documentation is divided between our community site (WordPress
based) and a sphinx generated documentation which is part of the code
base but not in a clear way, so we really need to clean things up. We
therefore decided to move all technical and functionality docs out of
WordPress into the code base which makes the destinction between the
target groups clearer and helps us keep the documentation up to date
(documentation of new features can now be part of pull requests instead
of hoping they get added to WordPress).

We got an issue open for this here:
https://github.com/openspending/openspending/issues/736

We also talked about the translation efforts. We seem to be on good
track, there are some new translations coming in, even after the meeting
so that's just very exciting. What is needed now is to properly document
the translations process and make it available for our translators (and
would be translators) and include the documentation in the code base
(and point to it from the community site).

Another point raised about translation was to try and automatically
update translations every week. This hasn't really been done (any takers
on making the automation script?) but the translations efforts have been
watched closely and updated whenever big chunks of translations have
been finished (and deemed ready by the translation team).

When we feel we have a substantial amount of new strings that need
translations we will notify on the openspending discuss mailing list,
not only here on the openspending developer list or in the transifex
announce system.

By the way, we have seen a lot of activity around languages (and a few
are already at 100%) but we always need more translators so head on to
our transifex page and see where you can help:
https://www.transifex.com/projects/p/openspending/

Here is the issue about the documentation.
https://github.com/openspending/openspending/issues/737

There was quite a lively discussion about the new os-upload. Some of the
discussion was about the security problems with the current version. We
agreed to at least as soon as possible acquire a wildcard ssl license
(we have single domain ssl license now for openspending.org) to increase
the security of upload.openspending.org (since that exposes users API
keys on an unprotected site. The long term plan is to start doing oauth
for our users.

There was also a discussion about whether os-upload should be in it's
own repo and whether modularity is always good. There are pros and cons
to each approach. When going for separated services we need to put more
focus into intergration and versioned api's for these services but that
keeps our code more manageable and easier for new contributors to
participate. There is still some discussion about whether this is the
right approach so we're going to take it up on the next meeting.

Then we talked about the huge cost of hosting openspending. In short,
it's expensive. Too expensive for a project with little donations. We
therefore need to switch to a more inexpensive hosting solution as soon
as possible. Thanks to some recent developments we know where we can
save a lot of money with the migration (AWS) so we're going to move as
soon as possible (this is top priority).

If you're interested in this discussion and want to contribute here's
the ticket about the hosting costs:
https://github.com/openspending/openspending/issues/738

We touched lightly our SEO problems and decided that a top priority for
us would be to change the dataset base pages from javascript browser to
server generated html pages (we've already fixed the indexing problem
where search engines didn't have access to our sites).

Here's the issue we're working on now with the server generated pages:
https://github.com/openspending/openspending/issues/732

We also had a pretty lively discussion about federation vs
centralisation of the OpenSpending database. Do we want to help people
put up their own instances of OpenSpending or focus all our efforts into
a central instance. There were opposing opinions on that one so we
agreed that we would have to create a new OSEP (OpenSpending Enhancement
Proposal) to discuss federation vs. centralisation so all arguments for
and against can be recorded and used to make the final decision. We'll
therefore leave this discussion until that OSEP has been created.

A lot of things discussed last time, so that's why we're only sticking
to few topics for the next meeting and hopefully we'll be done in one hour.

# Old logs

We record these meetings. If you want to read the old logs of the
previous dev meetings they are available here:
http://meetinglogs.okfn.org/openspending/2013/

Look at the .log.txt files (link in .txt [not .log.txt] is incorrect).

# Time zones

14 GMT/UTC in different places:

* Los Angeles: 06:00 (6AM) - who goes up that early?
* New York: 09:00 (9AM)
* Rio de Janeiro 12:00 (noon)
* London: 14:00 (2PM)
* Berlin: 15:00 (3PM)
* New Delhi 19:30 (7:30PM)
* Tokyo 23:00 (11PM) - insomnia anyone?

-- 

Tryggvi Björgvinsson

Technical Lead, OpenSpending

The Open Knowledge Foundation <http://okfn.org>

/Empowering through Open Knowledge/

http://okfn.org/ | @okfn <http://twitter.com/OKFN> | OKF on Facebook
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