Privacy of distro-team meetings

[Matthew East]

Thanks Matt for the detailed reply.

On 10/09/2007, Matt Zimmerman <mdz at ubuntu.com> wrote:
> On Mon, Sep 10, 2007 at 08:08:19AM +0100, Matthew East wrote:
> > A couple of people have mentioned to me recently that they were
> > concerned that at the last distro-team meeting it was resolved to have
> > 50:50 private/public meetings.
>
> First of all, this is not the case.  What was resolved was to continue the
> development team meeting (which has always been held on #ubuntu-meeting)
> every 4 weeks rather than every week.

We're talking about a different decision, and I think probably a
different type of meeting; see below.

> I anticipated some confusion as a result of this, and so it was communicated
> explicitly here:
>
> https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-devel-announce/2007-August/000326.html
>
> (there were no responses to this announcement that I saw)
>
> Where did this 50:50 information come from?

The concern as it was passed to me was referring to this meeting (pick
up at 01:15):

http://people.ubuntu.com/~fabbione/irclogs/ubuntu-meeting-2007-09-06.html

As to the type of meeting, see below.

> Please note also that, properly speaking, there was no such thing as a
> regularly scheduled "distro-team meeting", "distro-team" being a term used
> inside Canonical to refer to the subset of Ubuntu developers who are on
> staff.  The weekly meeting was, for good reason, called the "Ubuntu
> Development Team" meeting, and explicitly invited participation from
> all Ubuntu developers, not only the subset who work for Canonical.
> Unfortunately, there were folks who informally referred to this meeting as
> such, it being the one meeting where all of their teammates were also
> present.

{snip}

> Now, much more active discussion happens in team meetings (like the periodic
> server team meeting, desktop team meeting, etc.), which are more focused.
> These are generally tracked on the team's wiki page or via the fridge.

Thanks, I think that goes some way to explaining what's going on. The
concern that was raised to me appears to have been about a desktop
team meeting, not a development team meeting. The concern was simply
that "development" related issues discussed by that team be done
publically, while internal issues can of course be discussed
privately. As far as I can see, that's what the team resolved to do,
but it is just a question of communication as to ensuring that the
process is seen to be doing that.

Apologies for any confusion caused by the way I expressed the original
post, I wasn't clued up about the distinction between teams.

> > would it be
> > possible to get some regular summaries of planned specifications,
> > distro team meetings or other progress?

{snip}

> In the past, the progress of the various development projects underway was
> reviewed at the weekly Ubuntu Development Team meeting, where everyone
> presented a short summary.  About 9 months ago, the number of concurrent
> projects reached a level where this became impractical (with meetings
> lasting hours), and instead, developers are invited to summarize their work
> by email on a weekly basis.  For Canonical developers, this is part of their
> weekly routine.  You can find archives of all of these weekly summaries in
> the wiki:
>
> https://wiki.ubuntu.com/?action=fullsearch&context=180&value=develteammeeting&titlesearch=Titles

Ah, that's very helpful - I wasn't aware of such a comprehensive
summary system; as I'd only seen one or two on mailing lists. That's
probably my fault rather than a symptom of needing to improve the
system. Although it would probably be quite easy to include links to
any development meeting summaries in UWN, a quick review of the latest
ones seems to suggest that isn't currently done. I'll suggest it.

-- 
Matthew East
http://www.mdke.org
gnupg pub 1024D/0E6B06FF