[General] Meetings < IRC < E-mail

[Ted Leung]

Last week at the OSAF staff meeting, we discussed our goal of  
shifting from a meeting heavy culture to an e-mail heavy culture.    
At the same time, we have a lot of new people on the various OSAF  
projects, including interns and students from the Google Summer of  
Code (SoC) program, who are supposed to be learning how an open  
source project works.

I would like to remind people that the mailing lists should be our  
primary means of making proposals and decisions.   This is  
particularly true for the SoC mentors and students.   We are several  
weeks into SoC, and there is very low traffic about SoC projects on  
the mailing lists.    Mailing lists are a staple of the open source  
process.  Having students learn to work in an open source fashion is  
very important to Google, which is important to us because it impacts  
our future participation in SoC.  SoC mentors, please start pushing  
your discussions about the SoC projects into the public mailing  
lists.    If you are creating wiki pages, please remember to post the  
URL's to the appropriate list.   This applies equally well to OSAF  
summer interns.

IRC is a useful tool, but it is only one step up from meetings in  
terms of openness (this is because the IRC channels are automatically  
logged).   It is fine to discuss and problem solve in IRC.   But when  
the discussion is finished, please send some kind of summary to the  
mailing lists.  Do not assume that because you discussed something in  
IRC, that all the people who might be affected will get the  
information that they need.   Please be sure that when you finish an  
interaction in IRC that you stop and think about who else might need  
to know about the discussion.   This won't be all discussions by any  
means, but it's probably more than you think.

Meetings, and this includes telephone and Skype calls, are the most  
closed.   There is no logging of any kind, and decisions that get  
made in meeting are frequently opaque to anyone who was not in the  
meeting.    Frequently, meetings don't include all the people who  
have input on a particular issue.   A few weeks ago, Intel Mac  
support was on the agenda for the Chandler engineering meeting.    
Based on the knowledge of the people in that meeting, we believed  
that Intel Mac support was (many) months away.    Since Chandler now  
runs on Intel Macs, we were obviously mistaken.    I attend a lot of  
meetings, and I see these kinds of disconnects happening often.     
Taking many of these discussions to e-mail would allow the people  
with the relevant knowledge to contribute at the most appropriate time.

Ted