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[Thomas Gramstad <thomas AT ifi.uio.no>]

On Sun, 12 Jan 2014, Grégoire wrote:

> 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

Interesting topic and suggestions.

Just a few random thoughts or comments:

 * issue tracker: it's a good tool, but it also requires quite a bit
   of effort/work, including regular removal of spam.

 * pub meetings: nice, but will probably be slower/more off topic.
   Maybe some people find it easier to find time for a meeting
   lasting one hour, rather than sitting in the pub the whole evening?

 * how about sound recording (parts of) the meetings. Making the
   files available to those interested? Maybe even make podcasts
   of them? Or write more detailed minutes from the sound files
   later.

 * internal pre-conference sounds like an interesting idea, then
   maybe it should have some real presentations as well, not just
   planning. Like rehearsals of presentations planned for the conf.

Thomas