International ILIAS Blog
Report from the Technical Board (December 2016)
In July this year, you were able to read the first report from the Technical Board which has been in charge of the development of ILIAS since earlier in the year. Since then, a lot has taken place, according to Timon Amstutz, who just recently took over the role of speaker of the board for the next six months. We spoke to him about the new Jour-Fixe process, improved communication possibilities and the plans for 2017.
Hello Timon! The new Jour-Fixe process was accepted and has now been in place for around two months. Along with other changes, new feature requests are now discussed beforehand in separate workshops. Two questions about this: according to the members of the Technical Board, what are the most important changes in practice for the members of the ILIAS community? And what have your experiences been so far with the new process?

Two adjustments especially, have, in my view, led to significant changes. The first is the limitation of the length of discussions on new feature requests to 15 or if necessary 30 minutes. This forces presentations to be clear and to the point and also serves to make sure that concepts are well thought out prior to the Jour-Fixe meeting. There is now much less time to make up for missing conceptual work with the other developers at the Jour-Fixe. Additionally, the requests have to be reduced to manageable proportions. Should a single request contain too many proposed changes, it is not really feasible to discuss it all in one single slot. Several requests have therefore already been divided up or moved to workshops. Splitting such large requests has made discussing them significantly easier – it is much clearer which proposed change is actually being discussed.
The second big change is the new template for feature requests. It puts a much larger focus on the problem that is to be solved, the practical application and the necessary adjustments to the user interface. The latter is often presented visually. This makes things much easier, as images are often able to communicate new workflows much more directly than words.
Are there any changes that have caused problems up to now?
There is one change that has to 'settle in' a bit: It is now necessary to register feature requests at least a week before the Jour-Fixe. This is in order to give other community members enough time to study the request and, if necessary, make comments. The idea behind this is to slim down and unclutter the discussion at the Jour-Fixe itself.
Up until now, however, relatively few requests have met the respective deadlines. We have therefore been accepting late requests. At this point though I have to hold up my hand and admit that I also handed in a request late myself – which is obviously not the goal we were aiming for.
I think, however, that this problem will solve itself as soon as we get closer to the 'feature freeze'. The slots at the Jour-Fixe will then become more contested. Late requests will simply be moved to the next Jour-Fixe.
Besides the Jour-Fixe, the Technical Board has also taken on the communication within the ILIAS development community. Among other things you have re-organised the mailing lists. What changes have you made here? And what is the relationship with the forums?
- Using the address tb@lists.ilias.de it is possible to contact the members of the technical board directly. We are happy to answer any questions regarding the development process of ILIAS but also to get feedback on our five areas of focus. We can't however judge any feature requests – that is the job of the Jour-Fixe!
- Any security vulnerabilities discovered should be sent to security@lists.ilias.de.
- Security vulnerabilities that have been closed/patched will be announced on ilias-admins@lists.ilias.de. As the name suggests, this list is aimed primarily at system administrators. As well as notifications on the topic of security, information on new ILIAS releases and announcements from the SIGs will be published there. This list will be used solely for announcements. If you want to discuss any of the topics, anyone interested can do so in the corresponding forum.
- The mailing list developers@lists.ilias.de is also only for announcements. The main areas of focus are announcements regarding new functions or interfaces as well as new guidelines, announcements of SIG dates and information on the topic of coding. This includes how-tos, tutorials etc. This list also has an affiliated discussion group.
Where can you register if you are interested and want to stay up to date?
Depending on what you are interested in you should register for the developers mailing list at http://lists.ilias.de/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/developers or for the admin mailing list at http://lists.ilias.de/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/ilias-admins in order to stay up to date with the latest announcements. It is also worthwhile subscribing to the respective forums in order to be able to discuss current topics.
It is worth noting that we have disbanded the old develop-ilias@uni-koeln.de. So no new messages will come from there.
We are of course also interested in the daily work of the technical board. How is it going?
The main part of our work together is the virtual meeting that takes place every second Tuesday after the Jour-Fixe. In this meeting we discuss current topics and requests, vote on proposed vetoes and define further steps and tasks that need to be undertaken. We set ourselves strict time limits. If larger projects need to be dealt with then we agree on separate dates, outside of the meeting, in which to deal with them.
Our regular meetings have proved extremely fruitful. I believe that we are now really very efficient at determining and handing out new tasks. Luckily we have only once had to vote on a veto (as already reported).
Every now and again your also meet up in real life....
This year we had our second real-life meeting in Bern. At this meeting the focus of our discussion was on the how to deal with code that has no explicit maintainers. This exists especially for numerous cross cutting functions in ILIAS. We have, as yet, not found a final solution to this problem but have identified the essential problem areas and discussed possible approaches that could be taken.
Additionally, we also came a step closer at the meeting to being able to publish our strategy paper. In this paper we will reveal the strategy with which we will approach our five fields of activity.
Finally, we also appointed the speaker for the Technical Board for the next six months. We decided to change the speaker every six months at our face-to-face meetings, which is why I have replaced Richard Klees in this capacity.
What does 2017 have in store for the Technical Board?
Things are ticking over nicely now. It is our goal to publish our strategy paper in 2017. On the basis of this paper, further measures will follow that should mean lasting improvements for ILIAS. We are always happy to receive feedback and suggestions from the community. Please get in contact with us via the mailing lists mentioned above!
Timon, many thanks for your time - and thanks to the whole Technical Board for your work!