On Thursday 16 December 2010 08:43:28 Sankar P wrote:
In a few months we have a release. That means there is work to do. <snip> During the 11.3 release, For the release notes, we gathered this "list of new things" from the individual team(s) via IRC itself. IIRC, I gave it for GNOME, Bille for KDE, and then we just got hold of some kernel people over irc. So, we can repeat the same this time. I believe we may not need a face-to-face meeting just for this. However, any face-to-face interaction will do more good than harm :-)
Yup. Surely we should start asap, try to get features together etc. But writing a release announcement and planning a release is a huge amount of work. A 3-day sprint (for example) can make a huge difference. I know the marketing meetings of the last 2 years 3 months prior to KDE releases made a huge impact on the quality of the announcement [1]. [1] compare http://www.kde.org/announcements/4.4/ and http://www.kde.org/announcements/4.5/ - the first has a feature guide [2], the second doesn't. We just couldn't do two feature guides per year, so much work as it is... [2] http://www.kde.org/announcements/4.4/guide.php
There are a lot of problems with travel like Visa, cost, accomodation etc. However, I am not against face-to-face meetings, I believe it is better to spend that money for something else like oSConference, instead of release-marketing-planning. (my 2 cents etc. no strong opinions on this)
Yes, there are costs. But the goal is not that much release-marketing-planning but release-marketing-DOING ;-) Besides, regular team meetings are a very good thing - we don't do that enough in openSUSE. Many of the marketing people couldn't make it to the openSUSE conference, we might be able to do better here. Cheers, Jos