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