Our biweekly meetings

[Martin Pool]

Thanks, Barry, for raising this, and for your thoughts.  I was
flattened by flu last week, but am well now.

I think the key things are communication about what we've
accomplished, and making sure we understand what we can do next that
will most help Ubuntu developers.  The meeting was a really great
forum to tell what we've done, and I think a fairly good forum to find
out what to do next, though a bit limited by sampling only a subset of
keen users.

In the area we're working (perhaps like Ubuntu and other Canonical
teams) we have a lot of reactive work in response to user feedback.
We also have people mostly working on individual projects.  It's great
we can respond to our users, but it does mean that if we set a single
project like "get zero udd failures" it gets a relatively small slice
of total effort.  One answer to this is to cut down our scope and
focus on just finishing import failures, which would give a concrete
objective goal, but it feels a bit like distorting our work just to
make planning easier.  Getting some attention to issues across
different areas is useful.

[I was going to try to describe all the different attributes of the
way we organize our work that are either problematic or not, but I
think I'll skip it.]

Concretely, what we could do is this: I will send out a mail twice per
month saying what we got done in the last month, and what we plan to
do in the next month.  Then we can have discussion either here or on
irc about whether that's good or bad and whether the future plans are
on track.  That can also mesh in with other monthly/quarterly/annual
reporting/planning for Canonical.

I'm sure that like for abstraction layers in computer science,
anything in management can be solved by adding communication except
having too much communication.  Nevertheless this seems worth a go.
Other ideas welcome.

Martin