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[Grégoire <gregoire AT fripost.org>]

Hello all,

At the evaluation meeting in December, we talked about communication during 
fscons planning and decided to continue the discussion at a later point. I 
suggest we take this discussion on the mailing list to get input from those 
who cannot attend meetings in Göteborg.

Here are the problems I see and others that have been mentioned during the 
meeting about the current communication situation (if I missed something, 
feel free to add to this list):

- It's difficult to get an overview of what is going on
- By having most things discussed during meeting we miss the input of those 
who cannot attend (occasionally or systematically)
- it's difficult to get involved if you don't live in Göteborg
- there is little traces: the minutes tend to report only the final decision 
and less the discussion leading to this decision. In addition some things 
decided during meetings are forgotten and never implemented

Electronic communication leaves more traces (if you're not convinced, ask the 
NSA :-D) and can reach more people but I remember that I personally wanted to 
have more meeting when the conference wast mostly organized on irc and I 
still think they are good for newcomers, brainstorming and getting things 
done faster together. They also provide some rhythm in the planning.

On the other hand, meetings are but one of possible collaboration tools. We 
already have a wiki, this mailing list and an irc channel. A lot of open 
source project seems to function ok by having only few physical meetings but 
relying more on MLs, irc, wikis and documentations and bug tracking systems.

The general question is how can we make the conference planning more open and 
more trackable?

Some specific points:
- What should we do during the meetings?
- What should we do electronically?
- Should we try to use an issue tracker to implement progress tracking?
- Maybe there would be more people if we had meetings in a pub? ;-)
- ...

A concrete idea I have been thinking about is to have some kind of internal 
pre-conference: at some well chosen point in the planning we would have a 
mini conference with the following features:

- in the same venue as the conference, so we get used to it, especially for 
new-comers
- some talks about the conference organization: web infrastructure, budget, 
promotion, graphics, important changes
- we could follow with some kind of hackathon where we work together on 
different aspect of the conference and finish the day in a social place, 
making it big enough and hopefully interesting enough for people to come from 
outside of gbg

This will be a bit of work to organize and it would only be worth the trouble 
if it attracts people who don't come to the regular meetings, but it might be 
interesting to consider, and in my opinion it could advantageously replace a 
few of our regular meetings.

Ok, I'm stopping here and I'll wait for someone else opinion on this.

Have a nice evening everybody,

Grégoire

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