On Sat, 11 Dec 2004, Dirk-Willem van Gulik wrote:
Sounds a lot more feasible than travelling to .us for a hack. But I'm wondering what this actually achieves? Sure, it gets people to focus on Getting Things Done, but a *scheduled* IRC+pastebin-based hackathon could do that without the hassle and cost of travel.
IMHO, a 'virtual hackathon' has been proven not to be effective for us. In the past when we've tried those, they've been a dismal failure as so
few people show up. The communication latency is also so high (people get
distracted, bored, conflicting schedules) that a 'virtual hackathon' is
really little better than the mailing lists we use every day.
I think forcing people to get in the same physical room free from other distractions a few times a year (certainly no more than once a quarter!) would have good benefits for us as a project. It'd serve as a forcing function for our focus as a group: and that'd be excellent to drive innovation here.
As I just said to David, I think the ASF-wide hackathons aren't as effective because many people are too over-committed to be able to focus on one thing while they are there.
So if all the projects follow your lead, then instead they'll be too over-committed to attend (since they'll have to go to all these different hackathons for each project). I don't see how you can win this one - overcommitted people are overcommitted - they either want to give you their attention or they don't. If they don't you aren't going to engineer them into doing it.
So, I'm opposed to project-specific hackathons - its inefficient and antisocial.
Cheers,
Ben.
-- http://www.apache-ssl.org/ben.html http://www.thebunker.net/
"There is no limit to what a man can do or how far he can go if he doesn't mind who gets the credit." - Robert Woodruff
