On Tue, Feb 24, 2009 at 5:20 AM, Dave Walker <[email protected]> wrote: > The reason I'm going to suggest an "AFK" lunch, is that productivity and > in some respects, concentration started to lack - even in the best of > us. A proper break really did help get things back on track, also > constant supplies of cups of tea is essential! :).
The Philadelphia Jam also took a food break - everyone moved from the conference room to the kitchen and had pizza together. Not only did it boost productivity when we returned, it gave us a chance to really relax and talk, which was especially important for the newcomers who might have felt uncomfortable going off-topic while we were tackling bugs. The non-bug talk over pizza was fun and really valuable, gave us an idea of where the interests of folks attending focused on so we could work with their skills to plan future events. > Also, ensure the event organiser - or someone with approachable > skills just walks around often enough to check how people are doing. > You would be surprised how many people would rather sit there, scrolling > the mouse button up-and down Firefox all day; stuck, rather than ask for > help. Absolutely. This was pretty huge in our case, since we had a number of newcomers who we had encouraged to come, so it was important that we checked on people and made sure they were not uncomfortable and feeling lost. We also worked hard to put emphasis on the whole process not being easy and mechanical, saying a lot of things like "You'll click on a lot of bugs, have no clue what they're about, and move on, I do that all the time and I've been working on bugs for months!" And aside from the standard lists of "Easy" tasks we found it useful for people to pick a specific program they were familiar with and go through the bug reports, this helped narrow down the sometimes overwhelming field of bugs and got them working with a program they were already familiar with. -- Elizabeth Krumbach // Lyz // pleia2 http://www.princessleia.com -- loco-contacts mailing list [email protected] https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/loco-contacts
