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[Gregoire <gregoire AT fripost.org>]

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Hi Stian (and others),

Thanks for your comment. I think they make a lot of sense and I really agree 
that there is a lot of advantages to having physical meetings. I've tried to 
give some detailed thoughts inline but I'd like to start with a concrete 
proposition for improvement.

I suggest to change the main activity during the work meeting: instead of 
having discussion with an agenda and a secretary who tries to record 
everything, we could come with laptops and get things done during the meeting.

Here is how an hypothetical meeting would go:
- - Instead of having a walkthrough we could have a time at the beginning of 
the meeting for everyone to update the wiki while others are arriving and 
getting started
- - Then the agenda would be replaced by an open list of thing to work on. It 
could be drafting a promotion email, hacking on the website, designing 
poster, updating the manifesto...
- - we could create small groups to work on some topic or just spend some 
time cleaning the wiki or writing emails to speakers or sponsors.
- - each group would be responsible to recording what they did. Either by 
putting it on the wiki, sending it to the ML or committing in a git repo.

This still allow verbal (and non-verbal) communication, allow us to know each 
other and add some rhythm to the planning while improving documentation on 
the wiki, naturally pushing more discussions to the mailing list and getting 
things done faster.

(more comments bellow...)

On Jan 16, 2014, at 6:05 PM, Stian Rødven Eide wrote:

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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.

Let's arrange for one then!

> 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.

This goes both way. You could as well say that not everyone is used to or 
eager to participate in physical discussions. And that there is 33 people on 
the ML but it's rare that more than five of us participate in the meetings.

> 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.

While I understand the benefits of it, round taking, in my opinion, tends to 
make long meetings and that also deters some people from attending. (that's 
kind of self-regulating if you think about it, although not the good kind.)

> 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.

That's true, but I'm suspecting it doesn't work as well for everybody ;-)
But that's actually one motivation behind the mini pre-conference: to create 
an early checkpoint in the conference planning.

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

I'd maybe add "decision" as well. This might be a problem in a mail 
discussion where the time is not delimited as it is in a physical meeting. So 
the discussion can go on for too long or, more likely, can die without having 
reached a decision. On the other hand, deciding on the mailing list feels 
more transparent.

> 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.

An other thing that's better when discussing on a mailing list is that there 
is more time to respond. Not only you are not constrained by the time frame 
of the meeting to express yourself but in addition, since we have not been 
very diligent in publishing meeting agenda in advance, you don't have a lot 
of time to think about the issues at hand during the meeting.
Off course this is not good when the matter is urgent.

> 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).

I mostly agreed with what you wrote here. Although the question remains of 
how do you enforce tracking? and who would take the bossy role?

Grégoire

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