Hi Martin,
Thanks for continuing to post the meeting minutes. I'm not sure what others think, but I'd find them more useful if they came out a little bit closer to the actual meeting that they're recording. As it is now, things (like grant deadlines) which are mentioned in the future tense can have already passed by the time we read about them.
the Advisory Committee decided to work with Bocoup on the project.
Martin will coordinate the next step with Bocoup.
Very cool. Are you working with Boaz or someone else? He has a long history in front end technologies in Boston and Irene Ros was a data vis pioneer when she worked for them.
We discussed the difficulties for external developers to bring new large changes to OpenRefine.
Large changes are difficult whether they come from within or without.
The community often pushes back, pointing at the complexity and difficulty of implementing the feature rather than welcoming it (as described in User Interviews Results Part 3: Cultivating a Thriving Developer and Trainer Community)
I don't see any details in the linked document. Do you have some examples of proposed large changes that were shut down? The only large change that I'm aware of was internally generated (Antonin's work).
we should stop explicitly inviting people to fork OpenRefine. Contributing back to upstream is complex and time-consuming.
Absolutely! A hard fork is a sign of failure (or short sightedness). While quickly hacking on a fork can seem to be lower cost, it's almost always more expensive in the long run and the forks end up being stranded in dead ends without access to new features, security updates, etc. It just ends up causing everyone to duplicate work.
If, for example, someone wants to create a re-themed OpenRefine fork, what they should do, in my opinion, is add support for themes to OpenRefine, including porting the existing OpenRefine theme to the new mechanism as the standard theme, and propose that as a PR. If it's well designed and doesn't negatively impact the core or other integrators, I don't see any reason it would have difficulty getting merged. I haven't seen anyone propose anything like this, but I easily could have missed it, so if you have pointers to relevant PRs, I can go back and look.
Tom