At the general meeting of the ILIAS society in Bremen, it was unanimously decided to set up a new body focused on software development: a Technical Board responsible for mainly strategic decisions that affect the long term development of ILIAS. The Technical Board takes over the central tasks of the previous Head of Development position, thereby taking on an important role within the development management of ILIAS. ILIAS Product Manager Matthias Kunkel welcomed this decision: "With the establishment of the Technical Board, the reliability and quality of the development of ILIAS has now been placed on a sustainable foundation".

Behind the decision to create the new board was the simple fact that the increased time demands of the tasks involved were no longer possible for one voluntary Head of Development to handle alone. This was why Alexander Killing resigned from that position after many years in 2015. It is all the more gratifying that Killing is a member of the new board along with his interim successor Fabian Schmid. At the ILIAS general meeting in Bremen both were unanimously voted (one abstention) to the new Technical Board along with Timon Amstutz, Michael Jansen and Richard Klees. The board therefore has an excellent line-up that is ready to master the coming challenges in the development of ILIAS.

Within the framework of the decision-making process for the adoption of new features in ILIAS, the Technical Board may comment upon all suggestions and thereby recommend or veto them. The Technical Board concentrates upon the software and technical side of issues rather than educational/didactic ones. It functions as an advisory body to the Product Manager in the matter of technical questions.

The constituent meeting of the Technical Board in Cologne, Germany, on 21st March, dealt at first with various administrative topics and then with starting work-planning for the coming year, according to the board's spokesperson Richard Klees. A central issue was a first interpretation of the function and responsibilities of the Technical Board as instigated by the ILIAS community and laid out in the bylaws of the ILIAS open source e-Learning e.V. society. The Technical Board wants to pay special attention right from the start to fulfilling its strategic role. It cannot be expected in the future that the board will check every line of code that is implemented in ILIAS. Rather, the board will primarily determine the larger lines of development. For this reason, they will not regularly flesh out concrete feature ideas. Accordingly, such requirements and requests will still have to be formulated by community members themselves. It is important though, according to Klees, that the quality of feature requests is further improved: the more explicitly requests are formulated, the easier it is for the development management to discuss and evaluate them.

The Technical Board is responsible for five departments: software architecture, performance, security, operating concepts/usability and the development process. It was decided not to assign specific departments to individual members of the board. Dividing the responsibilities in such a fashion doesn't seem to make sense as, at a technical level, there are many connections between the departments. They can't therefore, according to Klees, be viewed in isolation from one another. In internal discussions, all members of the board have equal voting rights. Outwardly, however the board will speak unanimously with one voice and shares the responsibility for the departments.

Communication will be an important part of the Technical Board's work. The society members, the maintainers and the product manager, but also the larger ILIAS community all have to be reached. The first meeting with Matthias Kunkel, the Product Manager, was extremely constructive according to Klees. First of all, it will be necessary to make it possible for the board to have simpler access to the regular, fortnightly 'Jour Fixe' meetings in which decisions are made concerning the implementation of new ILIAS features and bug fixes. For this purpose, the board would like to receive a more precise agenda in order to reach an internal consensus in advance. It isn't practical for all five members to always attend all such regular, fortnightly meetings, making it necessary for the board to have reached a consensus beforehand. The community-requested power for the board to be able to veto individual feature requests should only be used in cases of dire emergency. Generally, the board relies on dialogue and communication and will make a concerted effort to discuss contentious features with the other committees at early stage.

Matthias Kunkel is already looking forward to working with the Technical Board: "Their competence and their understanding of ILIAS will really help me as Product Manager, together with the developers, to make the right decisions for the further development of our learning platform."

The Technical Board will meet regularly in person or via conference call on Tuesdays after the regular, fortnightly 'Jour Fixe' meetings. The upcoming meetings will ascertain how best to arrange the communication with the ILIAS community. We will of course keep you up to date with the further developments in the ILIAS blog.