Re: Tomorrow's Docs Meeting

[Eric Christensen]

On Wed, 2009-03-25 at 09:33 -0700, Karsten Wade wrote:
>  On Wed, Mar 25, 2009 at 12:43:25AM -0400, Eric Christensen wrote:
>  > I have further updated the agenda for tomorrow's meeting[1].  If you
>  > have an opinion on how the Beta Announcement should read or what tool(s)
>  > we will use to publish our documentation then you should be there! 
>  
>  I have an update that is a potential show stopper.  According to this
>  page:
>  
>  https://translate.fedoraproject.org/tx/projects/docs-release-notes/master/
>  
>  ... building with Publican means no translation using common L10n
>  infrastructure.  Each translator would have to 'git clone' the
>  repository or otherwise submit PO files more manually.
>  
>  So that's a patch to Transifex needed for Publican; a few patches to
>  Publican to make it produce RPMs compliant to Fedora Packaging
>  Guidelines; and package freeze is coming very quickly on 14 April. 
So those are pretty big problems.  We need to hash this problem out at
tonight's meeting.

>  > I'd also like to use the Docs conference room
>  > (2008) on the Talk server[3] to speed through some ideas.  
>  
>  Some alarm bells went off last time we used the Talk server and made
>  decisions.  I heard from a few people who were surprised about the
>  process and missed the follow-up to the mailing list.  I don't think a
>  summary of that discussion quite made it to the list.  We have that as
>  a minimum requirement.
>  
>  The issue with using Talk for a regular team meeting is that it raises
>  barriers to participation, segregates the discussion, and has no
>  recording/logging capability.
>  
>  Even if recording were enabled, we would still have the barrier of
>  spoken language being much harder to understand to non-native
>  speakers.  Where an IRC log can be run through a translation engine to
>  get the gist of a discussion, that is nearly impossible with an audio
>  meeting.
>  
>  I understand and agree with the value we get from high bandwidth
>  verbal discussions, but is the added value worth all that we lose? 
While I agree that there may be a higher barrier to participation I
think the benefits of having a real-time conversation that isn't typing
based would help with discussing issues.  I agree that we need to have a
scribe taking minutes to post to the list and to the wiki to maintain a
record of what has happened.  Right now we routinely carry items from
week to week because the discussion takes so long via typed words.  Plus
I feel as if there is a greater risk at misunderstanding someone's typed
words when written in a quick manner like we do in IRC.

What is keeping people from participating utilizing Talk?

>  - Karsten 
Eric