A couple of suggestions for efficient meeting time. I ain't sayin that the FreeCAD folks have it all figured out. Far from it! But we've learned from mistakes and here's what has worked for us.
*Have an agenda. * The easy way is to create a google document and set sharing so anyone with the link can edit it. (Version control discourages any malicious activity and is easy to revert) This gives people a place to put a topic during the two weeks before so it gets remembered. Anyone can also edit it as the meeting is going so you capture decisions. - Use a numbered outline, not bullets. That makes it easy to refer to items. - Every topic should have a tag from a small list that guides what you want to do with it in the meeting. (DISCUSS, TODO, REVISIT, THANKS, etc) - Every topic should have a name on it. Usually the person who created it or the person you'd like information from. Here's an example. The actual agenda starts with 'Rolling Agenda' so the first few pages are just reference material. This is after a few years and it has grown in complexity but it still follows the basic structure and it started simple. https://docs.google.com/document/d/127iLZ-pdgbrU77ev2U5Zrogakt98RfugNp8mt0Lvj3s/edit?tab=t.0#heading=h.1l09jryzxp5 We start at the bottom and work up. We try to move fast and we're usually able to cover the whole agenda in an hour. *Use Github tools* Just clicking around, I think you're missing out on a lot of really good github functionality; particularly projects, milestones, and teams. Projects are really simple structures. They're basically just fancy spreadsheets. These let you start viewing collections of issues and pull requests together. The big picture view is helpful and it's trivial to change the project structure because it doesn't affect the underlying issues and PRs. Here's a more mature project for the CAM workbench <https://github.com/orgs/FreeCAD/projects/21/views/1>. I use this as the agenda for the CAM meetup every two weeks. We work through the tabs at the top starting with 'regression'. From what I can see, you have very few people in your github organization (2?). FreeCAD, in contrast, has about 85. Adding someone to the org is low-cost and by itself doesn't do much. It allows you to @mention them in issues and prs. Then you can start building teams and @mention a team by name. That's helpful if one or two people are focusing on packaging or testing, for example. Being a member of an organization is also good for the individual because org membership is public. Our use of milestones sort of grew out of using other github tools. It's been helpful for us working on more predictable releases (still a struggle for us). Something we're actively playing with and have NOT mastered is an AI notetaker. These things have gotten crazy good. We would love to find a free or inexpensive tool that: - Can be invited to a meeting like any other attendee and shows up automatically. - Generates meeting minutes and emails all the attendees. - Works with Jitsi (we prefer open source tools) We're currently using screenapp.io but not crazy about it. If you come across any tools that look good, let us know! On Sat, Dec 6, 2025 at 5:38 AM Steffen Möller via Emc-developers < [email protected]> wrote: > > Hello again, > > We now have a small streak of "every second Sunday" video calls. And > tomorrow, same venue, same time, is the next. We are not yet at the weekly > meetings like the FreeCAD folks are, but, we are getting there. Maybe some > other day at another time can be found, which would then attract a > complementary set of participants. > > Our last encounter brought some insight that our joint eyeball-time at the > call may not have been used in the most efficient way, and we had some > ideas on how to "achieve more" by our togetherness. We have this "every > time another moderator" mantra. @Rene, I was hoping for you. > > Anyone who wishes to present or raise a topic is welcome to join the > meeting. The moderator will allocate time for discussion as appropriate > before we proceed to the issues list. > > Best, > Steffen > > > Gesendet: Donnerstag, 13. November 2025 um 01:04 > > Von: "Steffen Möller via Emc-developers" < > [email protected]> > > An: [email protected], [email protected] > > CC: "Steffen Möller" <[email protected]> > > Betreff: [Emc-developers] Another Video Meetup on Sunday the 23rd of > November, 20:00 GMT+1 (CET) > > > > > > Hello, > > > > we had a good experience last Sunday with this "Big Blue Button" instance > > > > https://greenlight.bbb.uni-rostock.de/b/ste-c4d-brs-3k6 > > Access code: 869782 > > Date: November 23rd, 2025 > > https://www.timeanddate.com/time/zones/cet > > 20:00 > > > > and agreed to reuse that room two weeks later again. For the agenda > > it was suggested to jointly go through the issues. > > > > @Robert, yes, please be the moderator of this upcoming one. Technically, > > this one has now worked without a glitch. Since also Open Source, it > seems > > unwise to go back to what we had before, but let us test how well this > > now scales. > > > > Best, > > Steffen > > > > > > _______________________________________________ > > Emc-developers mailing list > > [email protected] > > https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/emc-developers > > > > > _______________________________________________ > Emc-developers mailing list > [email protected] > https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/emc-developers > -- Brad Collette 573-427-7132 _______________________________________________ Emc-developers mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/emc-developers
