Background
----------
Since the two virtual face-to-face OTC meetings of last week, and again
in the two OTC meetings this week, we repeatedly discussed replacing the
weekly "developer meetings" with official OTC meetings.
The "developer meetings" have so far seen frequent participation from a
subset of OTC members heavily involved in day to day tasks for the
[`3.0 New Core + FIPS` project][new_core+FIPS], and have been open and
advertised to all OTC members since the end of January, but they were
not qualified as official OTC meetings: they were meant to assess the
weekly progress within the project, and determine the coming week's
priorities, discussing and resolving any difficulties encountered.
Rationale
---------
At this point in the development process, in which we are refining the
state of development branch to finally qualify for the transition into
the beta release stage, upgrading these meetings to proper OTC meetings
seems appropriate and desirable, as discussion and assessment of the
remaining technical tasks increasingly requires discussion within the
OTC and OTC decisions, and additionally provides OTC steering on the
preferred way of completing some of the allocated tasks before the work
is done, rather than after the fact.
Personally, I also expect that upgrading the developer meetings into
full-fledged OTC meetings will increase attendance by the wider OTC
audience: this would provide the OTC as a whole with better oversight on
the progress towards the upcoming release, and would further improve the
quality of the release process by leveraging the plurality of OTC
perspectives and insights.
Meeting Schedule
----------------
So far, the "developer meetings" have been regularly scheduled each
Tuesday from 08:00 to 09:30 (UTC, 24h format), with a tendency to spill
into the next half-hour.
There have been cases in which we had to hit the 3h mark, but I wouldn't
describe 3h as the norm.
My proposal for the OTC meeting is to adopt the same 1h30m (+30m buffer)
approach.
Tuesday, 08:00 UTC as the starting time, has been so far a good
compromise between folks working in European and Australian timezone,
and keeping it is the current proposal, but is admittedly not the best
time for attendance from the American continents.
Vote: why and when?
-------------------
We are proposing a vote, rather than agreeing on it during the last
call, to invite discussion from the OTC members that could not
participate in the meetings during these two weeks, for example
regarding alternative time slots to improve overall attendance.
I plan to wait until Friday to open the actual vote: please provide
feedback before then if you would like to amend the letter of the vote
topic.
One item on which I'd like to ask for feedback is if the actual vote
text should include the specifics of the timeslot or not.
Proposed vote text
------------------
Hold online weekly OTC meetings starting on Tuesday 2020-10-13
and until 3.0 beta1 is released, in lieu of the weekly
"developer meetings".
Refs
----
[new_core+FIPS]: https://github.com/openssl/openssl/projects/2
