oST_Projects » Travel Support and merchandising mgmt

Meeting 2013-03-26

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General info

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* Date: 21th march 2013

* Location: SUSE offices at Nuremberg and Google Hangout.

Participants

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* Agustín Benito: openSUSE TSP supervisor

* Izabel Valverde: member of the openSUSE TSP Committee

* Pamela Mohr: SUSE's Operation Office

* Jos Port: openSUSE community manager

* Ancor González: developer

Topics

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### Discussion about the project motivation and approach

* Izabel is worried about the emphasis in the 'event-centric' approach of the application, she wants to be sure that everybody involved is aligned in a capital question: the program supports PEOPLE and not events. So the sportlight should be always on people (requesters) not on events.

* Discussion about events with several locations. Conclusion: are different events for the application purposes.

### Future development process

* A test-drive demo server will be deployed next week.

* Once a week, a new version will be pushed to this server and the goals for next week will be outlined.

* This process will continue week after week until the application is ready for production usage.

### Definition of the basic workflow

* 'Reject' does not reflect the nature of information exchange between TSP Committee and requester, since it's something that always happens several times per request and does not mean that the request is really rejected in any way. Changed to "roll back".

* Final stages of the reimbursement process (payment confirmation by the requester and finishing confirmation from TSP Committee) are not needed. Removed from the prototype.

* Waiting for the requester to always cancel the request or reimbursement process in failures is not useful. TSP members will be allowed to cancel, but the requester will always have the change to write some final notes about the cancellation later.

### Presentation of an early stage prototype

* Izabel is not completely confident about the current approach that allows everybody to read all events and apply for support for traveling to a previously created event. Maybe people would apply to events just because they found it in the list, with no previous idea about attending and with no good reason to do it.

* Subjects of the expenses should not be free, but selected from a predefined list.

* Discussion about different currencies and exchange rates. Conclusion: application will allow to set a currency for the request and another for the approved amount. Future processes inside the application and final payment will be done in the approved currency. Exchange rates and problems derived from fluctuations among request and payment dates are beyond the scope of the application (and beyond the control of TSP itself).

### Feedback and future steps

* The application should be used for openSUSE Conference's requests, so it should be ready (and integrated in the openSUSE infrastructure) before the end of April.