(2010/07/30 15:30), Bryen M. Yunashko wrote:
To be clear, the current 15:00 UTC time frame does not always work well. It doesn't benefit the Western Hemisphere that well, especially because 15:00 is very early in the morning for United States. 10 a.m. for me in Chicago and 8 a.m. for folks in California. And for those who cannot use IRC while at work, it shuts them out completely.
I sent out a mailing in the past to see if we could come up with a special meeting time that was more convenient for people in the Western Hemisphere with no response. So I continued with sticking to 15:00 UTC with the long-term hope that at some point we would expand to some other time zone to fit other regions.
Now, let me tell you what we did for the GNOME-A11y team that I work with. I proposed and set up weekly meetings there that alternate each week. 07:00 UTC and 15:00 UTC every Thursday. Specifically so we could get our Asian team members to participate. And it actually works pretty well. It meant that I had to be up for a meeting at 2 a.m. every two weeks, but I didn't care as long as we ensured that everyone around the globe participated fairly.
Would this kind of arrangement work for you? If so, I'm ready to do it for the team. In our case, I would suggest we have both time-shifted meetings on the same day. So I would attend at 2 a.m. and at 10 a.m. the same day. That way we keep topics close together instead of so differently each week.
I ask only two things:
1) Do you think people will show up at that hour from that region?
That's exactly the thing. I'm wondering why only few Ambassadors are involved in this topic. ATM, there are 71.99 subscribers (BTW, where has gone 0.01 subscriber ? ;-)) on this -ambassdors list [1] and 175 Ambassadors are registered [2], but most of them keep silence and haven't commented if the hour is agreeable to them or not. Does this mean, the scheduled meeting time 15:00 UTC is agreeable to most of the Ambassadors and they are going to join the meeting ? If most of the Ambassadors can join the meetings on that time frame, there's no problem. But if they won't join the meeting without making counter-proposals, does that mean, they are not interested in talking with other Ambassadors and improving the program at all, and the only interest they have is how they can get DVDs and stuffs from openSUSE project ? I hope my concern will prove unfounded... [1] http://lists.opensuse.org/stats/opensuse-ambassadors/opensuse-ambassadors.ht... [2] http://en.opensuse.org/openSUSE:Ambassadors_list
2) I want a commitment of coverage. I may not always be around to lead meetings at that hour and I would like to ensure that we have backup person to lead meetings when I cannot be there. AJ is already my backup for 15:00 UTC, now I want to see backup for 07:00 UTC.
This could solve the timezone issues. But obviously, it does not solve the language barrier issues and I'm not sure how we can address that. Primarily, openSUSE meetings are held in English, and that is actually a barrier we need to tear down. But someone has to come up with a creative solution that fixes that problem.
I'm willing to discuss this in more detail with you if you are interested in discussing ideas. I'm very interested to learn more about the Asian region and its potential as part of the openSUSE Community. We must do more to recognize and grow and strengthen ourselves in many regions of the world and not be stuck in the easy route of just staying English.
Looking forward to hearing your thoughts as well as other people's thoughts on this.
Well, Japanese for example, how many Japanese contributors except me can you name actually ? There certainly are a fair amount of openSUSE users in Japan. Some of them are writing articles about openSUSE on their own site and posting blogs. I've often called for them to be engaged in *main stream* of the openSUSE community, but most of them hesitate to join the discussions in English. This situation is what I want to change. And in order to do so, I want to share the ideas with other contributors all over the world. I hope Ambassador program will help changing this situation. Best, -- _/_/ Satoru Matsumoto - openSUSE Member - Japan _/_/ _/_/ Marketing/Weekly News/openFATE Screening Team _/_/ _/_/ mail: helios_reds_at_gmx.net / irc: HeliosReds _/_/ _/_/ http://blog.zaq.ne.jp/opensuse/ _/_/ -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-ambassadors+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-ambassadors+help@opensuse.org