Policy on DST

[Paul W. Frields]

Every once in a while there's a random annoyance that seems worth
bringing up and documenting for posterity.  Hopefully this is one of
those times.

In a nutshell: Does Fedora need a minimal policy for shifting the
schedule of the #fedora-meeting channel to account for DST?

Sticking with UTC sounds simple.  It's tempting to just use the geek
perspective and say that's the standard, but this standard causes
actual problems for humans, who govern their lives by local clocks.
Moving meeting times back and forth in local time during the year
seems arbitrary, and can create new conflicts that were carefully
negotiated months before.  That's a barrier, and therefore my and the
Board's job to assess and remove if possible.

Most of our contributor base observes some sort of DST, so we should
simply set dates on which the schedule shifts automatically.  We need
not use USA standards for the date of the shifting.

Practically speaking, the effect is that the meeting that happens at
11:00 local time during DST stays at 11:00 local time when DST ends,
and vice versa.  That's much easier on humans than dickering around
with UTC, especially when the tools we use for tracking our time
already have the built-in capacity to change over from DST to non-DST.

Why bring this up?  Take for example a Fedora team that meets in the
hour between two other meetings in the channel.  The prior meeting
moves its schedule in UTC (to stay at the same local time) and the
following one does not, and thus shifts earlier by an hour when DST
ends.  Suddenly there's a conflict.

We could leave this up to individual teams to resolve when this
happens, but wouldn't it be easier to just change one wiki page twice
a year?

And no, the decongestants haven't worn off yet, thanks for asking. ;-)

-- 
Paul W. Frields                                http://paul.frields.org/
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