Privacy of distro-team meetings

[Scott James Remnant]

On Mon, 2007-09-10 at 08:08 +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.
> 
From later in the thread, it appears that the meeting you are referring
to is that of the team at Canonical responsible for desktop development,
rather than the "distro-team".

Also as you point out in the thread, the resolution wasn't that the
ratio would be 50:50 at all -- that was simply a suggestion.

> I've had a look at the logs of the meeting, and as far as I can see
> the reason was that there are some Canonical-specific company issues
> that arise for discussion, which is of course understandable.
> 
> However, it's not clear whether the private meetings will only be used
> for those issues, or whether development issues will also be
> discussed. Would it be possible to clarify this?
> 
I think here we enter the danger of attempting to expose too much of
Canonical's internal structure into the Ubuntu project, which is harmful
because it begins to exclude the community.

I do not think it's particularly important that the "Desktop Team" is in
fact made up of people from the community and at least three different
teams inside Canonical.

(Likewise is it important that the Ubuntu Mobile and Embedded Team is
made up of members of the community, three or more teams inside
Canonical, and members of teams from other companies?)


A simple fact of any company is that it's necessary from time-to-time to
have team meetings based around reporting lines so that any company
changes can be communicated, and questions surrounding matters of
employment can be discussed.

Those meetings shouldn't really be public, since they may discuss
private matters to the individuals concerned, may discuss material that
is confidential (e.g. customer work Canonical is engaged in that pays
for the ongoing development of Ubuntu) or simply would cause confusion
if aired in public.

The meeting that you refer to is a pretty good example of the latter; it
probably should have been a private meeting, because it only really
referred to matters internal to Canonical.  While there was no
confidential or private material discussed, airing it in public has
caused this thread ;-)


On the other hand, it's important for the community that Ubuntu
development discussion happens in public, since members of the community
need to be able to participate.  That will obviously continue as it
always has done.

Scott
-- 
Scott James Remnant
Ubuntu Development Manager
scott at ubuntu.com
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