Open Mainframe Project TAC Meeting - March 27, 2025

All meetings are listed on the Open Mainframe Project calendar at https://lists.openmainframeproject.org/calendar, subject to the mailing lists to which you are subscribed.

Conference call details

Meetings are hosted on the LFX Meeting Management platform. More details on how to register are at https://tac.openmainframeproject.org/meetings.

Meeting Recording

A recording of the meeting and the transcript are both available at the link below:

Recording.

Attendance

Voting Member Attendance

  • Joe Bostian - International Business Machines Corporation
  • Mike Friesenegger - Feilong Representative
  • Sean Grady - Zowe Representative

Quorum Not Achieved.

Voting Members Not in Attendance

  • Phil Tully - Citi
  • Sudharsana Srinivasan - COBOL Programming Course Representative
  • Lauren Valenti - Open Mainframe Education Representative
  • Andrea Orth - GenevaERS Representative
  • Gregory MacKinnon - Broadcom Corporation
  • Giancarlo Frix - Rocket Software

Other attendees

  • Tom Slanda, The Linux Foundation
  • John Mertic, The Linux Foundation
  • Daniel Horak, Red Hat, Inc
  • Aaron Kippins
  • Donna Hudi, Phoenix Software International
  • Len Santalucia, Converge Technology Solutions
  • Soren Andersen, Bankdata
  • Elizabeth Joseph, International Business Machines Corporation

Agenda

  • COBOL Check Annual Review [#578]
  • Discontinue community.openmainframeproject.org [#803]
  • Summer Mentorship Program 2025 [#805]
  • IBM TechXchange 2025 [#809]
  • Strategy Session [#763]

Notes

General Updates

  • Summer Mentorship Program 2025
    • Deadline for program submissions is Monday, March 31, 2025
  • IBM TechXchange 2025
    • Deadline to submit a proposal for the main track is Friday, April 11, 2025.

COBOL Check Annual Review

Soren Andersen introduced himself and informed the TAC that the previous project leader, Rune Christensen, left Bankdata. Andersen said that they have struggled to fill Christensen’s role and need assistance from the TAC. Andersen added that Bankdata continues to use COBOL Check, but they do not have the expertise to contribute or expand the project.

Mike Friesenegger suggested emailing the mailing list and pinging the Slack channel, as a means to reach users of COBOL Check. John Mertic suggested reaching out to member organizations that use similar developer tools to see how COBOL Check fits into their toolbox.

Sean Grady and Joe Bostian volunteered to speak to their internal teams at Rocket Software and International Business Machines Corporation. Andersen suggested adding COBOL Check to Galasa, as they are both testing frameworks.

Friesenegger recommended rescheduling the review for six months. Tom Slanda offered to create a poll in LFX for TAC voting members to approve the rescheduling of the COBOL Check Annual Review.

Discontinue Discourse

Slanda presented the depreciation plan for the Discourse forum. Slanda said he will reach out to Discourse Support to assist with extracting data from the forum.

Slanda shared that other projects are using Gitbook or Docusaurus for their documentation. Grady added that Zowe uses Docusaurus and they like it, but it may become cumbersome if there is a large amount of data to organize.

Strategy Session

Friesenegger summarized the strategy session discussion from the previous meeting and presented the following topics as potential focus areas:

  • Start a mainframe industry group on using/promoting Software Bill of Materials (SBOMs)
  • Developing an AI chatbot for project documentation
  • Develop a directory of Experts / Subject-Matter Experts and identify areas of expertise with the Open Mainframe Project
  • Stand up the Mainframe Infrastructure
  • Slack vs Discord vs Other Alternatives

Friesenegger recommended that TAC voting members stack rank these items from most important to least important. Slanda volunteered to facilitate this in GitHub.