[ubuntu-za] Meetings

[Morgan Collett]

On Wed, 2007-02-28 at 15:07 +0200, Hugh Jacobs wrote:
> I'm sorry, but if you guys are gonna be planning meetings like this
> I'm gonna have to drop out of the team. I dont want to, but i do feel
> that announcing a meeting on the day of the meeting is unreasonable,
> there should be at least one week notice.

Hugh, for that I apologise. We are dealing with an urgent, critical
issue here - our web presence is on a server which is being trashed at
the end of the week due to failing drives. We directly mailed the people
who at the last meeting took responsibility for being on the WikiTeam as
this isn't something that could be solved by getting a large number of
people together.

On the day I was going to mail out a reminder to the specific people,
and then for the interests of transparency I decided to mail the whole
list.

We are going to have quite a few sub teams, responsible for the Wiki,
the Forum, the Mailing List, Marketing, Education, Events, etc and I
don't know if it is appropriate that each of these co-ordinate
themselves using the general mailing list.

Sub team meetings will be held at times arranged by agreement with those
who have made themselves responsible to take part in that function. It
is not feasible to get the agreement of the entire community for such
meetings.

> Furthermore, better times need to be set. 90% of the working
> population will be stuck in traffic at 4pm, myself included. try to
> make an effort so that a team can actually be there for a meeting, not
> just yourself and one of your friends. if we are gonna have an
> effective team, we need to start working as a team. that includes fair
> warnings of meetings and reasonable meeting times. weekday meetings
> should be left till after business hours, and should be announced a
> week in advance.

I agree with this. In this case, we needed to discuss some possibilities
ASAP. The issue came up at 15:30 on Friday, and tackling it via Jabber /
private email as we had been doing would have had no possibility for
participation. Hence we met in a public place and notified the list. I
will shortly post the transcript of the meeting on the wiki, and mail
the list.

> obviously, not everyone can make it to all the meetings, but setting
> bizaar times along with no fore-warning will cause there to be a
> dismal appearance. so yeah, i cant make it to this meeting, but will
> try to make it to the other ones.

Hugh, I appreciate your desire to attend this particular meeting and
participate. However the issue is critical and needs to be resolved
ASAP, and rather than a couple of us working on it in silence, at least
there has been some public visibility.

> i've made this point before, which it obviously fell on deaf ears. so
> make an effort, otherwise people wont make the effort. i really want
> to be a part of this team and get things off the ground, but this will
> not happen until we start acting like a team, and organising such
> events as a team.

I hope it is clear that resolving our hosting is in a different category
than a regular meeting.

Once we have a new server up and running, we will plan a meeting to
discuss our web strategy. This meeting will be announced on the mailing
list with reasonable notice and at a reasonable time which suits those
who have (or are willing to) commit to the WikiTeam.

Regards
Morgan
-- 
Morgan Collett <morgan at penguinlabs.net>
+27 82 555 9574
PenguinLabs - Open Source Consulting
http://www.penguinlabs.net/