Rethinking UDS

[Martin Pitt]

Hello all,

Matt, thanks a lot for your detailled analysis. You are spot on the
problems.

Matt Zimmerman [2010-05-27 14:50 +0100]:
> 1. UDS is big and complex. 

I totally agree, the current number of sessions is just overwhelming,
and talking about completely different subjects every hour does not
really help with focussing.

> 3. UDS is (still) exhausting.

The format and contents of an UDS week is radically different to what
most of us are used to at home, like working from home in a quiet
environment, working on only one or two projects a day, and scheduling
the day according to the structure of the work (or the eventual noise
of our emtpy stomach :) ) instead of the 60-minute grid. It's also a
very socially intense week, with lots of jet lag and beer and little
sleep.

So we have to (and do, I believe) accept this as part of the game.
Many participants that I talked to felt similar, but so far I heared
nobody who said that this week was _unreasonably_ exhausting (we
_could_ go to bed at 10 pm, after all).

> A. Concentrate on the projects we can complete in the upcoming cycle.

That would be very helpful indeed. We could also aim to not have UDS
sessions for some blueprints which are mainly meant for tracking the
status and work items during the development cycle, but do not
necessarily require a broad discussion.

I'd also welcome if we could more clearly define the goal of UDS.
Right now we try to squeeze in everything from gathering ideas and
getting to know upstreams and their plans, over refining the
development goals for the next release, until thinking about
implementation details of BPs. UDS has traditionally been a very
social-oriented event, so I think we should focus more on the
networking and idea gathering and reduce the Canonical strategic parts
and implementation details; they might be much better handled in
smaller sprints or conference calls, or in our usual remote fashion?

Martin
-- 
Martin Pitt                        | http://www.piware.de
Ubuntu Developer (www.ubuntu.com)  | Debian Developer  (www.debian.org)