[IPython-dev] Experimenting with a modified dev meeting format?

[Fernando Perez]

Hi all,

from looking at how our most recent dev meetings have been going, it
appears that we're probably reaching a size of team where having meetings
that are so long, and where we try to have detailed, back-and-forth
discussions for making technical decisions, is just not working well
anymore...

While the idea of a public "all hands" dev  meeting is one we're very happy
to have, and want to continue (and other projects seem to have followed in
our step), it seemed to work better when the group needing to really
discuss things in detail was a fair bit smaller.

In recent meetings, we're having folks tune out quite a bit, and we're
probably not making very effective use of the time of others...

So here's a proposal for a modified format:

- We turn our Tuesday 10am PST meeting into instead a "short reports"
meeting, where each person provides a quick update of the topics/problems
they've been working on, and presents any questions they may have, help
they may need from others on the team, etc.

- From this, we identify which sub-groups may later on break into other
channels (our regular mailing list, issues on github, quick discussions on
gitter, etc), to actually make decisions.

Basically, once  a meeting has more than ~4-6 people, it doesn't really
make sense to have it really be a detailed, long technical discussion,
since most people will likely tune out.  So only those people really
involved should participate.

This way, the regular 'all hands' meeting will be a more useful way for
everyone to remain informed of what we're all doing on the project, how
things are going, etc.


Then, there's the *separate* question of the technology for the meeting.
Lately, using Google+ has been driving us crazy, creating crashes for many
of us, dropping connections, etc... We'd like to experiment with other
options and see what works.

For now, we're going to try BlueJeans, it's something we have at Berkeley,
and which allows both web browser and plain old phone client access, it may
be a little better than G+.  We'll see how it goes.

Thoughts?

Cheers

f

-- 
Fernando Perez (@fperez_org; http://fperez.org)
fperez.net-at-gmail: mailing lists only (I ignore this when swamped!)
fernando.perez-at-berkeley: contact me here for any direct mail
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mail.python.org/pipermail/ipython-dev/attachments/20150627/782722d9/attachment.html>