Caffeine Break notes
25 attendees – 14 people online, 11 people in room

From Leslie Sherman – OBFS
They create applications or roll out vended applications for financial staff. Fixed assets, Fabweb for laptop locations – that’s one of theirs

One of their most important methods: Business analysts talk to subject matter experts and project managerrs. Being able to have people talk about their issues can be really valuable

Library side: Reference interview, journalism side: interview, UX side: user research – all useful skill sets

How to find out about configurations and etc beyond “ask CCSP”?
“How did you make this happen? How did you get this to be accessible? How do you share amongst peers?”

Nate’s team went to Drupal training on campus – they learned from the trainer but they also learned from cross campus people.

Leslie – Her group has roundtables where you get together and talk about what type of development they’re doing and what issues are rolling out. Have to use SiteMinder instead of Shibboleth. Upgrading from using EAS to the other system, roundtables were useful for information sharing.

There’s a Tableau group, Caffeine Break is here but really broad, topic orientation is helpful too – mailing lists, etc.

Andrew: Similar success with a collaborative round table kind of format, get together and know who’s working on what.
One concern about using regular public GitHub: No reason for public website code not to be publicly visible, but there’s a lot of internal information in the commit history. So can come to things like this and point to where it is, but can’t quite say put it up on GitHub.

Julieanne – A shared University accessible git hub has come up a lot

If it were University private, would that solve the problem?

Completely solves the problem for Andrew – has used several options, currently couch surfing on Engineering’s service

If you can connect with Campus LDAP you’re pretty set in terms of being able to make granular offerings

Engineering instance – a GitHub quote was something like $35K for everythihng for the campus, GitLab does it by head count so it’s harder and more expensive.

College of LAS is running GitLab – had a lot of success and has been able to opeen it up within their groups.

It needs a high level champion, but it’s really hard to find one because most high level people are not also directly coding on a daily basis and struggling at that layer.

Check about AWS hosting of a GitHub VM to provide flexible storage capacity?

What’s the business case for it? Persuasive cases – show how services like this let you bring in developers, researcheres, content providers, designers.

Why are people hesitating to add items to this spreadsheet when there were lots of additions to storage and APIs?

(a) It’s a mental barrier to contribute something to a document someone else made.

(b) People know of things they’re using, but hesitate to put information about things they didn’t create themselves – they don’t want to commit other people to supporting things for all of campus.

(c) GitHub would solve that problem – people post what they’re comfortable with other people reusing, and they can fork and customize as much as needed while still having the master available for updates

GitHub is useful to both IT pros and research community – Git in general and GitHub in specific is part of the Software Carpentry standard training for researchers with IT components to their research.
Andrew has a test case GitHub from original investigation, Steve Holland has a one pager for handing out

Issues that need to be solved to improve collaboration and reduce overlap and waste:

• Version control

 

• Collaboration

 

• Project management

 

• Issue tracking

• Status

Github offers all of these, including built in version controlled documentation

Dave: CS head wants to use Github because it’s the industry standard – and CS also needs it to be on campus because students could post anything, including data that shouldn’t be posted.
Other schools already have it.

Julieanne: Make the argumeent that this isn’t a lower priority – it’s an integral part of IT Power Plant projects that would benefit from having this available.
If we already have X instances and X staff – consolidation should reduce amount of money paid, license costs per group, etc.

(Individual vs bulk discount cost questions: Later investigation shows GitHub publicly offering $9/user/month “organization” – hosted by GitHub – or $21/user/month “enterprise” – where they give you something to host locally. But that can’t possibly be the same scale applied to organizations with tens of thousands of users like us – other universities are using it and they can’t possibly be paying a quarter million dollars a year for it. Still, if the cost proportions hold true, for cases where local hosting is not strictly required, it looks as though cloud hosting would be significantly less expensive. There is at least some level of group-internal privacy available for the cloud hosted information.
Additional information needed:
* What are the details of the volume discounts available? What are the cost break points? How can we get that information without falling afoul of purchasing issues about discussing costs with vendors?
* Can cloud hosted GitHub offer AD-controlled group management and campus-user-only access?

Suggestion: Version control as a campus IT policy – security, continuity, collaboration

AITS makes Subversion available to other people. They’ve talked about GitHub but don’t have it and don’t have a clear path for it. Could be interested.

Getting things done:
AITS uses ITPC process – submit projects, submit a proposal

Tech Services uses NewSOFT process – gather customer needs, determine what would make sense, make a business case, fill out form with discovered information, submit for consideration

Nate – will volunteer to talk to LAS, Engineering, Tech Services GitHub folks.

Andrew – notes collection from Git Solutions Committee investigations: https://gitlab.engr.illinois.edu/git-solutions-committee/git-use-cases