A mission statement, closer cooperation with the product manager and the first veto: the Technical Board has been picking up speed. We talked about the developments of the last few months with the speaker of the board, Richard Klees.

As a completely new body within the ILIAS society, the Technical Board first needed to find its place in the practical scheme of things. As the description of the board's role in the articles of association are, due to their very nature, rather short, the first thing the five members did was to sit down and come up with a mission statement covering their self-image, the key questions regarding their work and the most important goals of the individual departments.

As the list of potential tasks is long, the Technical Board has listed them according to priority and is tackling them in order of importance. The first concrete suggestion is concerned with the organisation and implementation of the regular Jour Fixe meetings. This regular appointment, central to the development of ILIAS, takes place every two weeks and involves the product manager, maintainers and the Technical Board. It aims to reach decisions on open feature requests and to resolve other development questions. Unfortunately it has proven rather difficult to plan these appointments in any detail up until now: some topics require longer discussions so that other items on the agenda are only briefly touched upon or even have to be rescheduled. One reason for this is simply the success of ILIAS which has led to an increased number of feature requests and other wishes from the community.

The Technical Board would therefore like to improve the planning reliability of the Jour Fixe meetings and ensure the transparency of the meeting process. The primary goal is to increase the efficiency for all participants and to find a way to enable more decisions to be conducted in a shorter amount of time. One way to achieve this, for example, would be by discussing the longer and more complex items prior to, instead of at, the Jour Fixe meeting itself. The board's concept for this will be presented at the DevConf.

Cooperation and Communication

Clear communication is very important for the Technical Board. For example, they want to avoid merely working alongside the product manager and the development team – rather, they want to work in close cooperation with them. The working relationship with Matthias Kunkel is, according to Klees, highly satisfactory. Provided he has time in his schedule, Kunkel attends all the regular meetings of the board and is involved in all non-technical issues. The communication with and within the wider ILIAS community should also be strengthened and deepened however. A proposal on improved use of mailing lists and forums is therefore being prepared and will be presented soon.

In addition to these proposals, on 8th June a little piece of ILIAS history was made when the Technical Board, for the first time, vetoed a Jour Fixe meeting decision. After much discussion, a decision was reached in the meeting regarding the revision of the navigation in the ILIAS Test Object. The board however found the solution unsatisfactory in a crucial detail: it would have impaired the usability of existing multiple choice questions – which is why the board decided to make use of its veto.

Fortunately this didn't lead to bother or stagnation, rather the proposal was thought through once more – and finally a better solution was found that not only solved the criticised problem, but also, in the mid term, will make an old setting in the Test Object superfluous. The Technical Board was extremely relieved at the constructive way that this was dealt with, according to Richard Klees. They hope, however, that they won't have to make use of their veto too often in practice – a necessity that we hope will be unlikely due to improved communication. We will, of course, report on further developments here in the blog!