Frictionless Data Community Call January 2024
On our last community call was on January 25th, we continued discussing the Frictionless Specs (opens new window) update with community members. As a reminder, thanks to the generous support of NLnet (opens new window), the Frictionless core team, together with a working group composed of members of the community, is now working on a v2 of the Specs. Read the announcement blog (opens new window) to know more about it.
# Working group discussion
The first thing we discussed was ways to prioritise candidate features for future Specs updates (beyond v2). At the moment, our idea is to prioritise those issues that get more votes (aka thumbs up), among the issues in the Specs repository (opens new window).
Note, the reference for the v2 update is still the one we initially published as a roadmap (opens new window) in the update announcement blog. For the v2 release we will stick to that list of issues.
Anyone is welcome to open a Pull Request to address any of those issues. The PR will then be reviewed by the working group, according to the decision-making process (opens new window) we have agreed upon.
In case of neutral response from a high number of members of the working group which prevents the achievement of the consensus, the issue gets deprioritised. In case someone has a strong interest for a certain issue that gets deprioritised, they can bring it to discussion during one of the calls.
Evgeny also brought up that on top of the Specs themselves, there are many non-functional things that need to be updated too. For example, the Specs navigation needs to be improved, with a clear structure of the metadata properties. Since all this non-functional stuff is still part of the Specs, and should therefore follow a defined process, it was proposed that this part would be led by OKFN, and reviewed at the end by working group members.
The last thing that we discussed during the calls were patterns. The purpose of the patterns has not been super well defined within the Frictionless project, and it is now unclear to some. The idea at the time they were introduced, was for them to be best practices, but not refined enough to be part of the Specs quite yet. It was also a way to share a certain approach. But there was no clearly defined mechanism to promote the patterns to be part of the Specs.
Since the approach with this Specs update is to simplify as much as possible and cut out what is not needed, it was decided to include the patterns in the Specs documentation (as some kind of Cook Book) and not in the Specs themselves, and rename them as their current name suggests a certain formality.
# Join us in February!
Next community call is on February 22tnd, join us to hear all the exciting news about the Frictionless specs (opens new window) update!
Do you have something you would like to present to the community at one of the upcoming calls? Let us know via this form (opens new window), or come and tell us on our community chat on Slack (opens new window)(also accessible via a Matrix bridge (opens new window) if you prefer to use an open protocol).
You can sign up for the call already here (opens new window). Do you want to share something with the community? Let us know when you sign up.
# Call Recording
Here is the recording of the full call:
# Thank you
On a final note, we would like to thank all community members that joined the call and that keep all these discussions alive, and particularly to those who are putting a lot of thinking and hard work into the specs working group. Without you, all of this would not be possible.