On 1/8/07, Paul Fremantle <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Carl
From my perspective face to face meetings can have value.
I think the main points are:
1) Is everyone who has an interest invited.
2) Is the meeting in the most convenient place
3) If people cannot attend, are they ok with that or would they like
it rescheduled?
4) Is there an opportunity to have a teleconference sponsored for
people who cant be there in person? Make sure there is a very good
conference phone.
5) Use IRC to take minutes and involve remote participants
6) If there are people who cannot take part or find it hard to follow
remotely, ensure that there is an opportunity to revisit any decisions
made, via the mailing list.
Here are my thoughts, which have some overlap and no disagreement with Paul...
There's obviously nothing wrong with any group of people getting
together to exchange ideas about an Apache project or to do some
coding together. There's also nothing inherently wrong with such a
F2F event when planned by the project committers or (P)PMC members,
e.g. hackathons or conference BOFs. I don't know of any official
guidelines for this, but here are my thoughts:
Above all, keep in mind the principles of openness, transparency, and
meritocracy. These each apply to a f2f meeting just as much as they
apply to anything else around Apache. Each of my personal guideline
below is based on one or more of these principles:
- You SHOULD announce any project event on the dev list.
- You SHOULD invite all interested non-committers as well as
committers. The benefit of getting someone new to become actively
involved in the project should outweigh concerns of an overcrowded and
unproductive meeting, especially when a project is relatively young
and not so popular that overcrowding is likely.
- You MUST NOT exclude any individual committers from the event
(unless the event is a private (P)PMC meeting, which should rarely or
never be needed).
- You MUST NOT charge a fee to attend the meeting, although you may
accept contributions to pay for meeting expenses.
- You MUST get PMC (not PPMC) approval to allow a company to formally
sponsor the meeting. It's always nice if a company wants to host the
meeting or buy folks lunch, but any formal plan to do so requires a
PMC's review, primarily to ensure there is no misunderstanding about
formal attribution, endorsement, or advertising. PMCs MUST contact
the ASF PRC (Public Relations Committee) if the company is asking for
anything in return.
- You SHOULD use an IRC channel during the event to keep a log of the
discussion and enable non-attendees to track and participate in the
discussion in real time.
- You MUST NOT allow any project decisions to be made unless they are
posted to the dev list. Realize that many f2f discussions might not
feel like "Decisions" but still might create a consensus about future
work that is only understood by one subset of the community -- get
these discussions documented on the list.
I'm sure there are other good ideas out there that I'm not thinking of
right now.
You might want to send a note to the Cocoon dev list and ask them
about their "GetTogethers". They've been doing occasional F2F
meetings for years now and probably have some good advice/lessons
learned.
Finally, after you've all had a chance to come up with what guidelines
feel right to you, I would recommend sending your plans to the
incubator general list to get feedback and also to let your PMC know
what you're doing.
Cliff
