FRC/2009-04-23 Inaugural FRC meeting

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Contents 1 Agenda 2 Documents 3 Minutes 3.1 Participants 3.2 INTRODUCTIONS 3.3 REVIEW AND APPROVAL OF CHARTER CHANGE REQUESTS 3.4 FRC STATUS CHECK 3.4.1 Development proposals and FRC process 3.4.2 Status of various roadmaps 3.5 DISCUSSION: FRC PRIORITIES FOR THE FIRST SIX MONTHS 3.6 SHAI presentation 3.7 QT / Orbit / Direct UI 3.8 REFLECTIONS ON THE DAY 3.9 CLOSING REMARKS AND NEXT STEPS 4 ACTION POINT REGISTER

Agenda

• 09:00 Coffee & opening remarks
• 09:30 Review and Approval of Charter Change Requests
• 10:00 FRC status check
• 10:30 Discussion: FRC priorities for the first six months

Jointly with UIC:

• 11:30 SHAI development proposal draft (not for approval)
• 12:00 Lunch
• 13:00 Qt-related development proposal drafts (not for approval)
  • 13:00 Qt
  • 13:30 Orbit
  • 14:00 Direct UI
• 14:30 Closing remarks

Documents

Documents presented/discussed at the meeting were as follows:

• Media:090423 FRC meeting.pdf - Ian's agenda and background slides
• Media:SF230409_Development_Proposal_Qt_v4.pdf
• Media:SF230409_Development_Proposal_Orbit.pdf
• Media:SF230409_Development_proposal_S60_Direct_UI_003.pdf
• Media:SF230409_SHAI presentation for FC council v0 8.pdf‎

Minutes

Participants

• Chair: Ian Hutton (Symbian Foundation)
• Pia Vuorela (Nokia) - acting secretary
• Masaomi Sumita (DoCoMo)
• Jean-Christophe Theard (Vodafone)
• Fred Blesser (TI)
• Sonia Ferrante (TI)
• Enrica Filippi (STE)
• Eva Jonsson (SEMC)
• Anders Westin (SEMC)
• Greg Wong (AT&T)
• Frederic Dufal (Orange)
• Javier Toribio (Telefonica)
• Stephen Storer (Samsung)
• Jonas Hasselberg (Nokia)

INTRODUCTIONS

Recruitment progressing and high priority item within Symbian Foundation. Chief architect, Roadmap manager, Teamleads for OS&Base, Middleware and Apps & Services are reporting to John Forsyth.
Proposed that councils meeting calendar should include joint F2F meetings with other councils. F2F location is by default London, Symbian Foundation office.
Also proposed more F2F meetings to strengthen the relationships in the beginning especially.
Need to have a proper infrastructure in place for the conference calls.

REVIEW AND APPROVAL OF CHARTER CHANGE REQUESTS

Anyone can propose change requests into the council charters to dedicated council chair, council to review changes and board to approve all changes finally.
Concluded to beta test online voting to approve council charter changes.
AP230409_01 To arrange online voting for the council charter changes, Ian Hutton.

FRC STATUS CHECK

Development proposals and FRC process

Aims:

• Elevate significant features for discussion
• Provide transparency
• Focus council (& community) energy in important areas

Dedicated template in use.

Our involvement:

• solicit them
• discuss and review them transparently with input from the community
• approve them for inclusion in the platform
• ensure that planned contributions follow a smooth process from the submission of a development proposal to its inclusion in a release

Do Foundation staff review the proposals? Basicly foundation is not controlling contribution proposals and community should make decisions.
Concluded that package owners are responsible for the packages and packages technical compatibility issues are under architecture council agenda.
Tried to leverage the best parts of each companies processes, not to reinvent Symbian techcom. Members use own investments to contribute new features instead requesting a separate company to use their investment.
Finally, need to iterate and improve the contribution process. The foundation has a member of staff, Lars Kurth, whose role is to support contributors and ease their path through the contribution process – he will drive improvements to the contribution process. Proposals are delivered via forums for voting and should be stored in the database as well.
Had also expectation level discussion. Conclusion is that Foundation is the hub and community should have the responsibility to propose contributions. Councils are additional mechanism to bring visibility and help members in their own planning.
Should never approve the contribution proposal without investment commitment. Minor risk built into the system, when no agreements in place – contributions are driven by business priorities in the each company in the end.

Status of various roadmaps

Levels of roadmaps:

1) Platform plan (maintained by Foundation staff)

• Published and available on the Symbian Foundation website
• Updates to be approved by the Feature and Roadmap Council

2) Technology domain roadmaps – 14 roadmaps (maintained by Foundation staff)

• most of the drafts available
• still very difficult to find in the webpages, Ian to give guidance where they do locate

3) Package roadmaps (maintained by package owners)

• some pilot package roadmaps exist now
• target (not yet agreed with package owners) to have all package roadmaps by the end of June in the website

AP230409_02 To provide technology roadmap links to FRC, Ian Hutton.

DISCUSSION: FRC PRIORITIES FOR THE FIRST SIX MONTHS

We initiated discussion on priorities, brainstorming a few potential topics. This discussion was cut short without conclusion and will need to be resumed at a later meeting (or on-line).

• Training on the job – get some concrete experience
• How do we achieve a suitable planning horizon for the roadmaps
  • Can we agree level of details for S^ +1, S^ +2, etc?
  • Look at S^2 etc as an exercise and decide how we would engineer this into a roadmap?
  • Should we include “vision” of likely trends in the roadmap in some way? Prioritised “wish list” of areas for contribution?
• Clarify and put into practice our links with other councils and SF staff / agree expectations both ways
• Development proposals
  • Close out the concrete ones
  • Agree the process
• Discuss how ideas can be married up with development resource
  • Is there space for a detailed idea proposal to start discussion , aiming to create a development proposal later (“call for contributions” )
• Get input from other OSS communities?

SHAI presentation

Telefonica: Cruicial to have it. Is there any thoughts about USB host support? Yes plans exist, no details available. Current solution partly based on commercial host stacks

ST: Is there any open standard API’s like Kronos? Do we see risk of fragmentation? In Multimedia area yes at least for some time. Looking also at OpenWL (composition framework). New multimedia framework relies heavily on OpenMax IL.<p> What license scheme considered? Nokia response: SFL / EPL, it follows other contributions principles.<p> Next steps: Development proposal and Technical Solution description. Nokia development proposal already in process, available in next few weeks.

QT / Orbit / Direct UI

QT Q&A remarks

• Nokia has no plans to change QT license model in the future.
• QT4.6 targetted into Symbian ^4.
• QT has own contribution model and changes should be contributed to QT.org.
• Code will be hosted and mastered in the QT.org and mirrored in the Symbian Foundation (details TBD)
• License models supported as open source and commercial, available as LGPL for members in the Symbian Foundation platform
• Target to get Development proposal stamped in the few weeks, already pretty stabile draft
• The impact of all three development proposals together => need to rewrite the applications
• Benefits: More compelling UI, Cross platform benefits
• The proposal would benefit from:
  • a clearer timeline for initial availability of code as well as for completion of work
  • discussion of why Nokia have selected Qt rather than other possible options
• It was agreed that involving the community earlier on in evolution of this kind of strategic change for the platform would be preferable, but the council recognised that this was not possible in this case as the Symbian Foundation is only now being set up.
• It was agreed that these three development proposals need to be tied together in some way such that a single overview of main benefits and impacts is available.

AP230409_07 Nokia to provide an overview of QT & Orbit & Direct UI development proposals that ties them all together and outlines overall benefits and impacts. Jonas Hasselberg.

Orbit Q&A remarks:

• Orbit is targeted into Symbian ^4
• Replacing Avkon UI framework
• QT and Orbit will be part of integrated release
• Reduces amount of components and adds overall simplicity (production driven activity)
• Questions were asked regarding how the story for developers would be kept coherent, eg retaining a single download for a complete development environment etc

AP230409_03 Nokia to provide more information about the replacing existing UI framework with QT/Orbit (list of API’s debreciated and replaced by new framework, reasoning for not continuing to support Avkon), Jonas Hasselberg.

Direct UI Q&A remarks:

• Nokia clarified that if this proposal were accepted support for non-touch devices would be absent in Symbian^4 but that this would be a temporary absence and that it was expected that subsequent work would reinstate non-touch support (a separate development proposal would be required here - Nokia consider this outside the scope of the current proposal).
• Nokia clarified that the IPR dependencies mentioned in the document do not relate to Nokia patents
• Using QT & Orbit does not block other technologies or runtime environments

General feedback on the development proposals included:

• Cutting edge aspiration, "must do" improvements, aligned with the Symbian Foundation's spirit
• Some aspects, particularly the compatibility break, require further discussion
• We (as a council) need to think about how we handle this topic across all councils in parallel
• Can the council approve this development proposal without understanding the minimum hardware specs that this solution would imply?

Performance requirements should be available in Technical solution descriptions already.
Concluded that synchronisation with Architecture Council required to verify their QT & Orbit & Direct UI potential action points.
Request to Nokia to see what they can say regarding the level of development effort associated with these development proposals. Members of the council indicated that even a small/medium/large indicator would be helpful in interpreting the proposals.
AP230409_08 Nokia to see what they can say regarding the level of development effort associated with these development proposals (eg small / medium / large), Pia Vuorela

The roll-out plan to developers (including timing of availability of tools and documentation) was identified as needing further discussion. No specific action taken.

Next steps:

• Development proposals to be updated and complemented based on feedback received in the meeting and posted to the SF website along with a summary that ties them all together
• Discussion is then started in the SF forums, questions being posted as responses to each rev of the proposals and resolved either directly or via updates to the development proposals
• Development proposals are proposed for voting once all major open issues have been closed

AP230409_04 To set up discussion forum and mailing list for FRC in Symbian Foundation, Ian Hutton.
AP230409_05 To verify AC and FRC actions related QT/Orbit, Pia Vuorela.
AP230409_06 To update development proposals for Direct UI/QT/Orbit, Pia Vuorela

REFLECTIONS ON THE DAY

Comments from attendees:

• "The concrete discussions around development proposals was very good"
• "Nokia's contributions and openness was appreciated"
• "The council needs to take care to be open in order to help build the community"
• "Very informative day, we are starting to define our role and that of foundation staff"
• "Good discussion in the meetings and also in-between in the breaks"
• "We must avoid inadvertantly building walls between the councils"
• "A very positive start"
• "Very exciting to see it all get going and out of planning"
• "A great constructive and concrete start"
• "Great to meet everyone and see that the foundation is finally a reality"
• "We need to learn and define our roles by doing"
• "The first few months of foundation operation will be challenging for development proposals as many developments are already in progress - we need to recognise this as we discuss them and accept that the community may get involved later than would be the case next time round"
• "We should celebrate this first meeting, it is the culmiation of much work"

CLOSING REMARKS AND NEXT STEPS

• Next conf.call 14:00-16:00 UK time on May 13th
• Next F2F will be scheduled in the 1st half of June (ideally week of 11th), 1 day duration. Co-ordinate with other councils before setting a date, ideally get all councils in one place to allow some networking/discussion in the evening.

ACTION POINT REGISTER

Action	Description	Deadline	Responsible	Status
AP230409_01	To arrange online voting for the council charter changes	Wk 18	Ian Hutton	New
AP230409_02	To provide technology roadmap links to FRC	Wk 18	Ian Hutton	New
AP230409_03	Nokia to provice more information about the replacing existing UI framework with QT/Orbit (list of API’s debreciated and replaced by new framework, reasoning for not continuing to support Avkon)	Wk 19	Jonas Hasselberg with Harri Vuolle	New
AP230409_04	To set up discussion forum and mailing list for FRC in Symbian Foundation	Wk 18	Ian Hutton	New
AP230409_05	To verify AC and FRC actions related QT/Orbit	Wk 18	Pia Vuorela	New
AP230409_06	To update development proposals for Direct UI/QT/Orbit	Wk 19	Pia Vuorela with Harri Vuolle, Matti Rantakari, Pasi Niemelä, Vesa Rantanen, Henri Haverinen	New
AP230409_07	Nokia to provide an overview of QT & Orbit & Direct UI development proposals that ties them all together and outlines overall benefits and impacts	Wk 19	Jonas Hasselberg	New
AP230409_08	Nokia to see what they can say regarding the level of development effort associated with these development proposals (eg small / medium / large),	Wk 19	Pia Vuorela	New

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