Org mailing list

[Stian Rødven Eide <stian AT fripost.org>]

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I think this is a very good summary of our challenges with regards to
communication. While I don't think there's an optimal solution,
improving on these issues might bring in more people in the process as
well, which also was stated as a major problem during the evaluation
meeting.

> - 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.

This is generally very true. My own experience, having attended all
meetings, was that I had a good sense of what was going on, even
things that weren't clearly stated (such as reactions or sentiments),
which is something that might be difficult to percieve during an
online meeting. Though of course, for everyone who weren't able to
attend, the short summaries that we published conveyed even less.

> 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? ;-) - ...

I find that physical meetings are good for several things. Firstly,
and perhaps most importantly, it helps us getting to know each other
better, creating a sense of community. For this reason, having pub
meetings would definitely be a good thing. I would very much like us
to start doing that. Perhaps once a month would be a good interval.

Secondly, not everyone are used to, or eager to participate in, online
discussions. I think this mailing list is an example of that. We have
33 members on the ML, but it's rare that more than five of us partake
in any of the discussions. Furthermore, I have no idea how many of the
silent majority actually reads the list at all. In a physical meeting,
we can assume that everyone is attentive, and it's also easy to take a
round and making sure that everyone gets to express their thoughts.
This holds for online meetings as well, although to a lesser degree.

I also think that physical meetings contribute to a stronger sense of
responsibility, in that you regularly meet the people you are
responsible towards. For me at least, it served as a very good
deadline for getting things done.

I'd like to try and split our communications needs into three practial
areas: discussions, tracking and reporting.

Discussions can of course be very different. For instance, with our
current discussion, we are trying to find a solution to a rather large
and difficult problem. For this, I think the mailing list serves the
purpose well, even though only a few of us are participating. On the
other hand, some discussions might be of a more urgent or formal
nature, such as when we are to decide upon the entrance fees, in which
it would be better to have a real time meeting, either physical or online.

With tracking I mean each and every committees tracking of their own
progress. Potentially, I think this can be up to the individual
committees, though I'm not sure whether it is always a good idea. For
the programme committee this was a simple matter; we divided the
responsibility early on, and synchronised our progress whenever we
felt it was necessary. The question is whether the Work Meeting (or
whatever we should call it - I mean as some kind of higher authority)
should take responsibility for the comittees progress, ensuring every
committee does what they say they will. As we experienced, some
crucial things were not done in time, and perhaps we need to enforce
some kind of public tracking in order to deal with this.

What we did have, however, was a requirement of reporting. Every
committee should report their progress and problems to the work
meeting. Obviously, this did not work optimally. Some people could not
or did not show up at meetings, and some of the tasks were always
reported as "not yet done", without anyone else stepping in to help
with the responsibility.

So, assuming that I've assessed the right problem somewhat correctly,
the conclusions that follow (in my head at least) are: We should
enforce public progress tracking and instate some overarching
responsibility group (meaning that the most involved of us need to
keep a better overview of all tasks and act a bit helpfully/bossy).

> 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.

In general I think this is a great idea. The only problem is finding
the right time. I'd like to have a Summer of FSCONS, though many of us
might not be available during the summer time. If it gets too close to
the actual conference, we might want to prioritise other things, and
there might not come too many outside visitors.

However, if we wish to discuss this further, I'd recommend we separate
it to another thread.

>> * issue tracker: it's a good tool, but it also requires quite a 
>> bit of effort/work, including regular removal of spam.
> 
> True. I'm personally divided about this. I think it could be a
> very god tool but, in addition to spam management, I'm worried that
> it might require too much work to get people to use it. Maybe it
> would be more time-efficient to concentrate on better exploiting
> the tools we already have, like the wiki.

If I remember correctly, the wiki can work nicely as an issue tracker.
I vote for using the wiki.

/Stian
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