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