Στις 10/03/2012 07:47 μμ, ο/η jdd έγραψε:

Le 10/03/2012 17:56, Christian Boltz a écrit :

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If you do _not_ attend the IRC meetings - WHY?

I hate IRC with more than 2/3 people. One hour blocked in front of the computer for 10 minutes work. Too much time lost waiting for other to type and triying to understand unsync discussion

In Greek meetings we follow some rules. If someone wants to talk, writes ! and speaks when chairman says. The same if someone has a question, we use ? When the speaker ends, he/she writes eof. This way everyone can follow the discussion and if we don't have much subjects to talk, we end soon. It also encourages people to talk. I mean at the project meeting I know that if I try to write something (I do not type fast), someone will say something else before me and my sentence will be out dated. So sometimes I just write +1. Stathis -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, email: opensuse-project+owner@opensuse.org

On Sat, 2012-03-10 at 19:39 +0100, Per Jessen wrote:

Christian Boltz wrote:

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Hello,

Am Donnerstag, 8. März 2012 schrieb Pascal Bleser:

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I'd like to propose or at least discuss dropping the bi-weekly openSUSE project meetings on IRC.

Reasons are: * because of timezones, work/family/etc, only a handful of people is able to attend the meetings (and there is no solution to that);

Yes, known bug. OTOH, we tried alternating meeting times in the past and IIRC we didn't get more or different people attending. So either the wrong time was chosen or the people in other timezones didn't want to join for whatever reason.

So let me ask a questions to the readers of this mailinglist:

If you do _not_ attend the IRC meetings - WHY?

"Meetings, bloody meetings" (John Cleese). There are too many, IRC is a poor medium and the agenda rarely has topics I'm interested in.

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* there is nothing that is discussed there that couldn't be discussed on the opensuse-project mailing list instead.

Sure? For example we wouldn't know that Henne thought it's already summertime without the last IRC meeting *eg*

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Any reason to keep the IRC project meetings? I don't see any, even though I'm quite fond of IRC ;)

The IRC meeting has a big advantage: Speed. One hour of IRC meeting replaces a week of mailinglist discussions.

Perhaps because people stay away due to timing. By using a mailing list, everyone can take part when it suits them. I don't think it would be a good idea to use the current list, I think it would be better to create a separate list for just that meeting.

Hello, I for my part would keep the IRC-Meetings for the mentioned advantage of real-time discussion of topics, but that’s only my opinion. And something I got asked from someone in the community that should be considered: How do you want to get the infos to interested people like e.g. bloggers who don’t want to subscribe to the mailinglists? Or do you want to keep them in the dark? -- Marcel Kühlhorn freenode: tux93 Have a lot of fun!

On Sun, 11 Mar 2012 16:13:46 +0100 Per Jessen wrote:

If they can't be bothered, they'll have to remain in the dark ...

Let me state few trivialities that above sentence ignores. There are those that need openSUSE and those the openSUSE needs. With single policy for all broadcasts about our activity, that requires all news outlets to seek info, we keep ourselves in a shadow of younger peers (distros) that recognized above and act accordingly. Life is the one that sets requirements and we can only meet or miss them. Feedback about that is our position among peers. -- Regards, Rajko -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, email: opensuse-project+owner@opensuse.org

On Sun, 2012-03-11 at 23:11 -0500, Rajko M. wrote:

IRC is perfect for decision making within team that has common interest, ability to be present at the same time and need to solve something fast. For all other use cases IRC is not the most comfortable way of communication for a world wide community and insisting on IRC is insisting to keep some people out.

And that only further strengthens the argument that we shouldn't be thinking of meetings or decision-making processes using one form of medium. We're a much larger community than we seem to act on. And our focus should be on engaging as widely as possible rather than settling for just one medium and if that doesn't work just throw it away. It's hard work, but I really think we should be thinking along the lines of multiple-mediums here. Bryen -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, email: opensuse-project+owner@opensuse.org

On 2012-03-12 08:39:32 (+0100), jdd wrote:

Le 12/03/2012 06:00, Bryen M Yunashko a écrit :

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It's hard work, but I really think we should be thinking along the lines of multiple-mediums here.

yes; having gateways wouls be great. But this also mean no realtime decision.

No, hard work means it won't be done. It's that simple. And removing "realtime decision" means there is no point to use IRC then. Just use the mailing-lists.

we could easily agree on a short delay, allowing to port the theme from IRC to mailing list, forum, planet... and asking for an answer on connect, for example.

Making connect work better would be a great step ahead

No tools will solve this. And it won't be connect, nor the forums, and the MLs probably won't ever achieve the same level of productivity either. If you want to influence the project, it's at the very least on the MLs, but IRC works a lot better. And that's very unlikely to change in a near future. As said in another post, that's how most if not all other Linux distribution projects do it too. I'm not saying "this is how it must be", I'm just saying "this is how it is", at least based on my experience. cheers -- -o) Pascal Bleser /\\ http://opensuse.org -- we haz green _\_v http://fosdem.org -- we haz conf

Rajko M. wrote:

IRC is perfect for decision making within team that has common interest, ability to be present at the same time and need to solve something fast.

Very nice summary. -- Per Jessen, Zürich (3.5°C) -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, email: opensuse-project+owner@opensuse.org

Having the meeting certainly helps. Although it is undeniable that much of what it may be discussed can be done away with. Trimming content and discussion may be a good thought but a very impractical one. Thinking that contributors to the project will not want to express their opinion and will align their comments to a tight time frame is unrealistic. It is also unrealistic to think the opposite way, that contributors will show extreme interest in what is being discussed that they will always comment in a meeting. Balance come from understanding our members at a point in time. Looking for a solution that will always hold true will prove that we have no way of keeping ourselves in line and we will have to change our methodology. Problably a good suggestion is to accomodate the meetings to once per month. Topics can be gathered and since it has been four weeks people can ready good topics, promote the meeting and if necessary, be ready to extend the meeting. Just an idea. Andy (anditosan) Sent from my iPhone On Mar 11, 2012, at 5:08 PM, Bryen M Yunashko wrote:

On Thu, 2012-03-08 at 22:33 +0100, Pascal Bleser wrote:

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I'd like to propose or at least discuss dropping the bi-weekly openSUSE project meetings on IRC.

Reasons are: * because of timezones, work/family/etc, only a handful of people is able to attend the meetings (and there is no solution to that); * as far as I've been attending those meetings (so that's a few years now already), there have always been 5 or 6 people who have participated (aside from the board team); * there is nothing that is discussed there that couldn't be discussed on the opensuse-project mailing list instead.

Now, that meeting also acts as a board meeting, but * the board can still meet, that's up to the board team to define; * anyone can poke the board team any time via email or poke us individually on IRC; * as far as transparency is concerned, we can, should and will publish emails about our decisions and our work anyway.

Any reason to keep the IRC project meetings? I don't see any, even though I'm quite fond of IRC ;)

cheers

In the very current state of affairs, the idea of dropping the meeting is sound, but I think we need to bring some history into the context because I think we're sacrificing something that used to be worthwhile.

* Project Meetings -- Used to be held around 17:00 UTC. Not sure how/when it was created, but in my own early days I attended these meetings. They were sometimes boring and sometimes useful. Ideas and initiatives were sometimes born in these meetings. Meetings were time-shifted every two weeks to accommodate different timezones. Project meetings were not owned by the Board. 1 Hour meeting.

* Board Meetings -- Originally closed door, it was moved to open meetings to be held the same day as Project meetings but a few hours later. However, two meetings a day proved a strain for a number of people. At the same time, we saw a decline in attendance to Project meetings. 2 Hour meeting

* Merged Meetings -- It was decided to try to increase overall attendance and community participation by merging the two meetings. Meeting time held during normal board meeting time. Overall meeting time = 2 hours.

Despite best intentions, we did not see an increase in participation. Times do change, and people's ability to participate can be greatly affected by their work and life impacts. And, as with anything else in FOSS, we can't expect the same usual suspects from years before to be continuously present.

We never did a good job of proactively encouraging people to come to the meetings. It was a very passive process. We wrote on the wiki. From time to time, I would try to remember to send out a tweet or post a message in other IRC channels (such as #suse) saying "A meeting is happening now, come join us!" and I would actually see people from those places log in, albeit just hang out in lurker mode.

We also never widely published the results of meetings. (Ok some meetings really didn't have anything useful to publish.) All we do is simply post the minutes or logs of a meeting. We once did post a meeting summary on news.o.o and had a rather interesting backlash from PJ but also some good comments that the summary was well appreciated. These days, our meetings are attended by people who already know about it and are able to fit it into their schedule.

What I miss fondly about the "good old days" of the Project Meeting is that it had a more brainstorming quality to it. Because it was a fairly open and non-rigid process, people were able to come up with some good ideas. My personal favorite, of course, is when we came up with Community Week a few years ago. Community Week creation is the direct result of people participating in the Project meeting and trying to come up with some interesting initiatives.

Now... back to the question raised by Pascal. Again, looking at the current state of affairs, its easy to agree with his question. But, I fear we are pruning a tree down to its bare minimum branches rather than giving the tree a chance to reach full bloom. We shouldn't be taking the attitude of elimination, but rather the attitude of proactivity. We should be discussing HOW do we increase community participation (whether it is via IRC or ML or whatever...) The Project, at its core, is about being a place to create initiatives and increase contributions.

Closing down the meeting may be sound. Its time may have come and gone, but I would argue the question should be appended to add "... and what are our alternatives for increasing Project initiatives?" Let's please discuss rescuing the intent rather than killng the symptom.

Bryen M Yunashko openSUSE Project

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On Mon, 2012-03-12 at 19:57 +0100, Pascal Bleser wrote:

So either decouple the project meeting from the board meeting, or we have to keep it as it is now. Or just drop it :)

I personally think decoupling is the wisest move. We don't want to kill conversation. But... just simply declaring the two meetings now separate once again isn't going to be enough. We need to figure out how/why to revitalize it or in the present state of things, it will be equally as dead. Hmm... (wheels spinning in mind thinking what's the best way to go forward in that choice....) Bryen -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, email: opensuse-project+owner@opensuse.org

On Tue, 2012-03-13 at 12:52 -0600, Alan Clark wrote:

If I were to try to pull some conclusions out of this thread it would be that an IRC meeting is effective when we have the following ingredients: 1. We are looking for real time, highly interactive discussion 2. with a focus on decision making 3. on a topic that has had pre-meeting discussion on the mailing lists 4. and the right set of people are able to attend 5. with a writeup, summarized for human beings, after.

Did I miss an ingredient?

AlanClark

+1 with a slight variation to #5... published widely to include at least -project ML + news.o.o. to get more people aware and potentially interested in joining in on the conversations. Bryen -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, email: opensuse-project+owner@opensuse.org

On 13.03.2012 22:08, Ricardo Chung wrote:

On Tuesday, March 13, 2012 02:49:17 PM Bryen M Yunashko wrote:

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On Tue, 2012-03-13 at 12:52 -0600, Alan Clark wrote:

...

If I were to try to pull some conclusions out of this thread it would be that an IRC meeting is effective when we have the following ingredients: 1. We are looking for real time, highly interactive discussion 2. with a focus on decision making 3. on a topic that has had pre-meeting discussion on the mailing lists 4. and the right set of people are able to attend 5. with a writeup, summarized for human beings, after.

Did I miss an ingredient?

AlanClark

+1 with a slight variation to #5... published widely to include at least -project ML + news.o.o. to get more people aware and potentially interested in joining in on the conversations.

Bryen

Excellent Alan's conclusions + Bryen's proposal to publish it widely (project ML+news.o.o)

I think sometimes we miss #2 and #3 and consequently the meeting get a weak for attending or participation.

If we are able to focus on the specific task we are goig to achive more (disregards what's the area or level).

Regards,

I guess it's just a matter of marketing and time. The first one can be changed to a better solution, the second one would be difficult. marketing - We announce the meeting over the calendar. I guess far too many people don't note that item or just oversee it. So, an article with a log of the meeting *and* the date for the _next_ meeting would help to motivate more people to attend IMHO. -- Kim Leyendecker, openSUSE Wiki Team GPG Key: 664265369547B825 | leyendecker@opensuse.org http://www.opensuse.org - Linux for open minds -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, email: opensuse-project+owner@opensuse.org

Alan Clark wrote:

If I were to try to pull some conclusions out of this thread it would be that an IRC meeting is effective when we have the following ingredients: 1. We are looking for real time, highly interactive discussion 2. with a focus on decision making 3. on a topic that has had pre-meeting discussion on the mailing lists 4. and the right set of people are able to attend 5. with a writeup, summarized for human beings, after.

IOW, like a regular meeting in an office. Sounds good to me. -- Per Jessen, Zürich (4.6°C) -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, email: opensuse-project+owner@opensuse.org

On 2012-03-12 09:23:56 (-0400), Robert Schweikert wrote:

On 03/08/2012 04:33 PM, Pascal Bleser wrote: [...] - On the ML we inevitably get bikeshedding and shouting as there are plenty of people that just type crap to annoy others, or they have issue focusing on the topic at hand, or.... Yes I know, there's an agreement to actively target those people and encourage them to be constructive participants or go away, still I think this is a problem of moving everything to the ML.

That is mostly related to - the people who attend the IRC meetings: there aren't any trolls around - trolls being warned and kicked away quickly on IRC, which is barely feasible on the ML - fact that there are only 5 or 6 people participating on discussions on IRC in the first place, at best

- The IRC meeting provides a level of interactivity that the ML can not.

True. But it doesn't prevent that we can chat about anything anytime on IRC. What topics require that level of interactivity and - can wait two weeks before being discussed, - can be limited to a handful of people instead of everyone on the list ? Seriously, I'm most concerned with taking any sort of decision during those IRC meetings, as barely anyone has a chance to participate. Yes, it is a lot longer to discuss on the ML, but that's precisely the point: get more eyes, ideas, experience. Obviously, we need to get rid of bikeshedding, but that happens on IRC too (albeit a lot easier to control).

- IRC meeting also give people an opportunity to just pop in, lurk and get a feel for things without having to subscribe to a ML.

Yes, if people actually did that. They don't :\ Now, it may be a few things: - most people don't like IRC or don't know it or fear it (hell, I don't know ;)) - most people are not interested in project matters, - most people cannot attend the meetings due to timezone, work, family, etc... (that's undeniably the case for many) - we simply don't advertise the meetings properly On the latter, a proper explanation of how to join the meeting could help. Or not. We tried in the past, e.g. the greeter having links to the #opensuse room.

- Just addressing things on the ML is tricky. Take the recent membership lapse discussion as an example. We had two more or less productive rather lengthy threads. Based on these we now have a proposed addition to the members page to describe "Membership Maintenance". Agreement on the next step on this topic took 5 or 10 minutes in the meeting. On the ML it would have probably triggered yet another long thread with potentially many repeated arguments from the first two threads.

It took 5-10 min because there were only 4-5 people discussing it. Of course, IRC is a lot more interactive, you write something, you get replies immediately. But it also only captures 1% of the eyes and opinions. As it works right now, I even believe the IRC meetings are bad for the project, because either we don't take any decisions there, or if we do, we keep almost everyone out of the discussion/decision. The former makes the meetings rather pointless, and the latter makes it unacceptable. IMHO. But maybe it was a mistake to couple the project meeting with the board meeting. It is definitely a lot less fun since then, because: - somehow we ended up with an obligation for all board members to be present during those meetings every time; - we hence aligned the time of the meetings to something that works for all the members of the current board team; - I have the feeling that having an agenda and taking actual decisions there rather than discuss and brainstorm is making the meetings utterly boring. Then again, nothing prevents anyone from discussing and brainstorming anything at any time on IRC. Really, do we need meetings for that? If we do, then we need a large amount of people to join them, or we're back to square one. To be honest, if you want to influence things in this project, you should probably spend some time on IRC. IMHO that's where most interaction, influence and decision taking happens. It is no different in most if not all similar projects. But it simply doesn't work for our (maybe too official) openSUSE project meeting there. At least in its current form. cheers -- -o) Pascal Bleser /\\ http://opensuse.org -- we haz green _\_v http://fosdem.org -- we haz conf

Hi, On Mon, 12 Mar 2012, Pascal Bleser wrote:

Now, it may be a few things: - most people don't like IRC or don't know it or fear it (hell, I don't know ;)) - most people are not interested in project matters, - most people cannot attend the meetings due to timezone, work, family, etc... (that's undeniably the case for many) - we simply don't advertise the meetings properly

I haven't attended the meetings as I don't know when they are held, so I feel there is definitely some truth in the fourth reason. However, I believe it is probably a mixture of the above reasons. I have attended an openSUSE ambassador meeting on IRC though and I feel IRC is a much better place to hold meetings, on the mailing list threads last a very long time often with people repeating what someone else has mentioned because nobody can remember the whole 2 week conversation. Also, there tend to be very few people contributing to the mailing list conversations too, so I don't think the threads take longer because there is more quality input from a wider audience. I think advertising the meetings a bit more would improve attendance, as would selecting the time which suits most people, a simple vote could find the most appropriate time window and day of the week. If people aren't attending because they aren't familiar with IRC the advertisement could also include a link to a beginners how-to guide to IRC, which might also get more of the community talking in the IRC channel outside of the meetings. To capture the opinions of those who are unable to attend, there could be some kind of pre-meeting discussion on the mailing list, which would also remind everyone (who reads the mailing list) when the meeting will be. Barry -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, email: opensuse-project+owner@opensuse.org

On Tue, 2012-03-13 at 13:03 -0400, Ricardo Chung wrote:

+1 Publishing logs on mailinglist serves two purposes: 1) keep people inform about what is going on 2) let some people think about what is going on. So it is possible to ask the right question or giving the right answer. Specially for people who has language barrier and need more time to elaborate in no native language.

I'm curious whether these logs are actually read? Logs have begun to be published in the last couple of months, but I never see any comments on ML about stuff within the logs. For me, reading logs is tedious and de-humanizing compared to reading IRC live. I think if we really want to get people to constructively comment, we have to not be so automated (i.e. publishing logs and be done with it) but to actually come about and write a summary. The problem with that is it requires commitment and time. It is a concept that in its one instance a year ago proves it is worthwhile, but at the same time, risky because it involves points of failure in implementation. Perhaps maybe we agree to form a group of volunteers to write these summaries? I have no problem doing it, but won't do it if I'm the only person. That's why I decided not to continue doing it last year because I didn't want that much weight on me. Bryen -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, email: opensuse-project+owner@opensuse.org

On Tue, 2012-03-13 at 13:35 -0500, Ricardo Chung wrote:

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Perhaps maybe we agree to form a group of volunteers to write these summaries? I have no problem doing it, but won't do it if I'm the only person. That's why I decided not to continue doing it last year because I didn't want that much weight on me.

Definitely it is too much weigh just for one person. In any case, logs summarize is implemented will need a disclaimer note (summarize is an interpretation not the log so go to read the log)

Perhaps the quickest way to "just do it" is to make this a news team function (and of course anyone can join the news team) and be sure to ask te board to ack the draft before we publish it on news + projectML? Ack will ensure the summary has at least some basic sense of accuracy and not be overly-interpretive. Bryen -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, email: opensuse-project+owner@opensuse.org

On Tue, 2012-03-13 at 15:58 -0500, Ricardo Chung wrote:

On Tuesday, March 13, 2012 02:57:54 PM Bryen M Yunashko wrote:

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On Tue, 2012-03-13 at 13:35 -0500, Ricardo Chung wrote:

...

...

Perhaps maybe we agree to form a group of volunteers to write these summaries? I have no problem doing it, but won't do it if I'm the

only

...

person. That's why I decided not to continue doing it last year

because

...

I didn't want that much weight on me.

Definitely it is too much weigh just for one person. In any case, logs summarize is implemented will need a disclaimer note (summarize is an interpretation not the log so go to read the log)

Perhaps the quickest way to "just do it" is to make this a news team function (and of course anyone can join the news team) and be sure to ask te board to ack the draft before we publish it on news + projectML? Ack will ensure the summary has at least some basic sense of accuracy and not be overly-interpretive.

That's would be great if it's not considered a management overhead (summarizing it and reviewing it) to publish it.

The beauty of this proposal is whoever is able to monitor or register irc activity is able to summarize it. And together validate each other this log summarize. Don't you think so?

It's all doable. And sure, we will probably stumble and run into some kinks at first, getting used to the process. But like I said, unless we see at least a handful of people willing to step up, its a worthless initiative.

...

Bryen

Regards, -- Ricardo Chung | Panama

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