Rotating team meetings

[Paul W. Frields]

On Fri, Apr 23, 2010 at 07:51:52AM -0400, Paul Frields wrote:
> On Thu, Apr 22, 2010 at 5:57 PM, Robyn Bergeron
> <robyn.bergeron at gmail.com> wrote:
> > On Tue, Apr 20, 2010 at 6:15 PM, Paul W. Frields <stickster at gmail.com> wrote:
> >> The Board members and I are interested in helping the project work
> >> toward making things better for the user base.  We discussed this
> >> topic at our previous meeting, and one of the ideas that came out of
> >> that meeting was a biweekly, rotating session, during which a
> >> different Fedora team representative could meet with the Board
> >> publicly on IRC.
> >>
> >> The Board has been conducting public meetings on IRC for some time
> >> now.  While we've been happy to hold a Q&A session there, it seems
> >> like often we could be better using that time to provide better
> >> coordination across teams, especially since we often have few Q&A
> >> topics that couldn't be answered here on the list.  I know there are
> >> several team leaders present on this list, so I put this question to
> >> them:
> >>
> >> If we set up this kind of meeting, would you be interested?  What
> >> would you want to come out of such a meeting?
> >
> >
> > Yes.  I think for marketing, at least, it would be interesting to be
> > able to present things like a marketing plan and/or a deliverables
> > roadmap and get input from the other teams.  Having an opportunity to
> > talk about it in a forum with people from other teams gives us a
> > chance to identify things like:
> >
> > * crossover - "hey, we're doing the same thing, or had the same idea"
> > * scheduling discussions - are we allowing enough time for X to
> > happen, before Y in other groups needs to happen, particularly with
> > new processes
> > * how groups can service each other - what can marketing do to help
> > advertise things like "we need people to come to test days," or "we
> > would love to have people be helping do documentation" - or how can
> > marketing get help doing translations? There are numerous pockets of
> > brainpower in different groups that aren't getting a lot of exposure
> > to each other - and therefore aren't finding out what we can all do
> > for each other.
> > * please tell us where we're lacking.
> 
> OK, what you're describing is somewhat different from what I had in
> mind.  I was describing having a single team's representative for each
> of these meetings, as opposed to a sort of project-wide roundtable.
> 
> That doesn't mean your idea's not good.  I don't think anyone expects
> team members, or even just leads for that matter, to be subscribed all
> across the board to every other team's mailing list.  Also, we need to
> remember that IRC can be a detriment in some cases because not all the
> teams leads could participate at a given time.
> 
> We have a logistics@ list that's for cross-team coordination though,
> and it's very low traffic.  Would it be possible to have the
> discussions you're talking about on that list?  That makes things both
> asynchronous and open.

I'd like to get this to some sort of actionable conclusion.  Right
now, we have two thumbs up, albeit one of them for a slightly
different idea than what we had in mind.  Here's what I would want to
achieve with such a meeting:

* Inform the Board and the community about one or two goals that one
  specific team has for the next 1-2 releases to improve Fedora,
  either the project or the distribution, for the entire user base,
  including our current contributors.

* Identify what that team thinks might block them from doing that, and
  if possible, what the Board can do to remove those blockages.

The Board talked about broad vision in our last meeting.  As part of
that process, we agreed that it was vital to talk to teams in Fedora
about what they see as missing or lacking.  If we can identify those
problems, then not only is that broad vision more likely to include
our contributors, but we can do a better job of unifying the people in
the Project around some substantial but achievable goals.  And just as
importantly, *measurable* goals, even if they're as simple as "did we
produce this new system/feature/process?".


-- 
Paul W. Frields                                http://paul.frields.org/
  gpg fingerprint: 3DA6 A0AC 6D58 FEC4 0233  5906 ACDB C937 BD11 3717
  http://redhat.com/   -  -  -  -   http://pfrields.fedorapeople.org/
          Where open source multiplies: http://opensource.com