Project Meeting 2024.10.03

Agenda

• Admin
  • General Admin, including Phase 10 agreements and payments
  • ActivitySim administrative support level of effort estimates
  • ActivitySim Issues

General Admin

• Ph 10 agreements and payments

  • Not doing as well on payments as MOAs. A few agencies have not signed MOAs either.
  • Guy Rousseau – ARC will be sending electronic funds transfer
  • Haidong Zhu – MAG sent check in August; Ellen Zavisca confirmed receipt.
  • Lisa Zorn – MTC sent their MOA and Funding Agreement in August, and check sent September 26; Ellen found the agreements, updated.

• ActivitySim administrative support level of effort estimates

  • Joe C reviewed the AMPO ActivitySim Tasks workbook. For each task there is a column defining AMPO’s role, Consortium’s role, Frequency (yearly, monthly, etc.), and columns for estimated Annual Level of Effort in hours.
  • Joe and Alex B have, separately, filled in some hours for each task.
  • Tasks include: executing vendor contracts; developing task orders; executing task orders; various activities related to receiving, reviewing, and paying invoices, and accounting; developing and tracking partner MOAs and Funding agreements; developing website and other communications material.
  • Joe discussed the difficulty of developing bespoke partner agreements.
  • Alex’s estimates differed from Joe’s primarily on the partner funding LOE – Alex’s were about four time higher. Other than that, for the most part, they were aligned.
  • Alex indicated that his LOEs for the MOA and Funding Agreements factored in “lawyer’s hours” to represent true costs.
  • Mark Moran suggested having AMPO staff make their own estimates.
  • Jilan Chen asked whether AMPO staff participation in meetings was factored in. Joe responded that meeting participation should be added to the spreadsheet. He also asked whether the LOE of AMPO’s participation and the future administrative entity should be a topic of consideration.

• ActivitySim Issues for Phase 10

  • Joe said he reviewed the list of past issues dating back 4 to 5 years.
  • RSG consultant team has been developing a list:
    • ActivitySim project on GitHub has a Phase 10A tab. David went through and cleaned out old issues that were no longer a concern.
    • David developed a list of about 25 issues, including bugs, feature requests, and performance improvements that should be retained.
    • Assigned LOEs: low = day, medium = week, high = longer than a week
    • David also assigned priorities. He suggested that people go through the list and review the LOE and priorities on their own.
    • There are some things not on the list, which he characterized as broader longer term issues, such as general PopSim enhancements. Some of the Phase 9 items did not make it into this list.
    • One item of note is adding a random component to the utility differently.
  • Joe C would like to add these other items to the list. He also mentioned some ideas that Sijia had which are not on the list.
  • Michelle Bina suggested that Sijia add them to the list and she’d coordinate with David Ory.
  • Joe asked David to coordinate with Joel and for Jeff Newman to also weigh in.
  • Michelle raised the issue of the consultant not always publishing their ideas because of competition when the RFP comes out.
  • Joe says he advocates for open sharing of ideas with collaboration. He has a personal bias towards cleaning out technical debt and outstanding performance issues and less about new features.
  • Joe also said that given the administrative uncertainty and funding uncertainty, he’d prefer not to have the funding be over committed.
  • Michelle was not sure she understood the logic of holding back on new ideas.
  • Jeff Newman suggested that new ideas need to be put forward.
  • Joe clarified that he was not as interested in new ideas as he was improving the existing product. He clarified that he was not interested in anything proprietary and just fixing things that are not working well.
  • Jeff acknowledged that there is a lot of work to do to improve existing features.
  • Joe Flood asked about the frequency of releasing feature enhancements, as SANDAG is running production and sometimes can’t wait. Jeff responded that releases can be made more frequent as long as there is someone available who can be paid to make the change.
  • Mark asked about having a final roadmap document. Joe’s answer is no. We have a document from WSP and a release progression, but nothing formal.

• Other Admin

  • Mark asked about the lack of a chat function in these meetings. Michelle explained the difficulty of this when the meeting is being recorded. Joe explained that this could be reconsidered.