Re: [Debconf-team] DebConf meetings this week

[Giacomo Catenazzi]

> On 22 Sep 2015, at 23:00, Philip Hands  wrote:
> 
> Margarita Manterola  writes:
> 
>> Hi,
>> 
>> On Mon, Sep 21, 2015 at 10:29 PM, Philip Hands  wrote:
>>> Could someone explain the purpose of the co-ordination team?
>> 
>> From last week's meeting [1]:
>> 
>> This team is in charge of facilitating the work of other teams. This
>> means that it makes sure that people are not blocked, providing help
>> in the form of people-power and advice. Additionally, it makes sure
>> that deadlines are met, that teams do their job and that they are
>> talking to each other.
>> 
>> [1] The meeting was called by the chairs, who decided to invite
>> Stefano, Bernelle and me. I complained pretty loudly about the
>> privateness of the meeting and the separate channel, but my complaints
>> were not enough to change that particular meeting.  The team mission
>> reproduced above was pretty much the only thing that we could agree
>> on.
> 
> Wow!  "Motherhood and Apple Pie"
> 
> That would seem to be a definition of what anyone in orga should be
> doing by default, at all times, assuming they are paying the slightest
> attention.
> 
> If we need to set up a new team for that, we are in deep shit.
> 

Phil… you are in orga since long time, so you know how thing are
working.  Many orga people care only on few things/tasks and they
don’t follow all organisation.  Core orga also have a real job and real
live, so they could be unavailable for few months.
But mainly it is because it was a big push from DC15 people to
avoid -team, and get decision delegations to subteam (which
indirectly it was done also not to inform entire team, to avoid
discussions).

You are also a member of video (sorry if I use you as example,
nothing personal, but we tent do over discuss ideal case, which
doesn’t exist, IMO). How -team could know the status of video,
when shipping discussion should be taken (in DC14 the
shipping discussion started much too late, but thanks Carl we
had alternate video materials).  This year I relayed various
statuses of video team to -team meeting (I think most about non
optimal meeting time for core video-team). [Also nattie is
unavailable on Monday evening. NOTE: and for DC15 and
DC16 things are better than in many other DCs: timezones
love us!] 

So someone should be in charge to get information from team
and check if things are working according other team plans.
The orga (in general) checks this, but it is better to have
people responsible to this important task.

I’m totally in favour to have more statuses report (not only
decision taken, but what decision is being considered [which
can effect other people/tasks/teams]) on -team ML (or IRC),
but there is huge resistance on that.


And for my personal experience, the huge tasks I got from
DebConf were because strict deadline and no volunteers
(registration and “publicity” on DC12, all registration system
and volunteer system in DC15).  I would like to avoid such
stresses in future, so I really want that someone care about
deadline and also to find volunteers timely.  Time constrain on
global meetings, and the pushes to have infrequent team
meeting (monthly) really don’t help.

Giving too much tasks to few core people + an implicit
coordination has also problems: this year we (on both
parts: “local" and “global”) failed several times because
too many tasks in parallel, to track everything.


I’m totally in favour to have more information (and more
frequent) in -team (the ML).  But I think you have read
this many and many time in past 5 (or more) years, as
requiring documentation so we know what to do next
without having to ping people for weeks.
So we are still in the non-perfect world which requires
ugly patches.

ciao
cate

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Re: [Debconf-team] DebConf meetings this week

[martin f krafft]

also sprach Giacomo Catenazzi  [2015-09-23 08:43 +0200]:
> But mainly it is because it was a big push from DC15 people to
> avoid -team, and get decision delegations to subteam (which
> indirectly it was done also not to inform entire team, to avoid
> discussions).

This is a misrepresentation of what happened.

We were not the first to steer away from the consensus-driven
approach we had pre-DC10, which more often caused decisions not to
be taken than consensus reached.

We have admitted multiple times that perhaps our biggest mistake was
to cease informing the team about pending decisions, or decisions
made and why they were made. At least I think this was possibly our
biggest mistake.

But part of the reason why we acted this way was because decisions
were challenged too often after they were made, and this just hurt.
In Debian, we can do this, as we have infinite time (the release
team is also pushing to change this, thankfully). But in DebConf, we
really do not have infinite time, and almost always, in such
a situation, any decision is better than no decision.

And the reason we opted to move meetings about mainly local issues
back to the #debconf15-germany channel was because of feedback from
people interested in DC15 who were scared off by the bikeshedding
and behaviour of folks on #dc-team, and by some #dc-team people who
complained about all the backlog about stuff they (rightfully)
didn't care about.

> I’m totally in favour to have more statuses report (not only
> decision taken, but what decision is being considered [which can
> effect other people/tasks/teams]) on -team ML (or IRC), but there
> is huge resistance on that.

Can you identify this huge resistance? What are the arguments by the
people resisting?

> How -team could know the status of video, when shipping discussion
> should be taken (in DC14 the shipping discussion started much too
> late, but thanks Carl we had alternate video materials).

I am on -team and quite frankly, I don't care about when the video
team ships stuff. This is not because I don't value their work, but
mostly because I trust them to do it right, and because I know that
they would turn to dc-team when they thought it was necessary.

> So someone should be in charge to get information from team and
> check if things are working according other team plans. The orga
> (in general) checks this, but it is better to have people
> responsible to this important task.

The information should be provided and fetched directly between the
people involved. Instead of employing a messenger in between, who
would also just look at a timeline and figure out dependencies
between tasks, this timeline and this dependency between tasks
should just be written down somewhere and known by people. Having
a proper project management tool to guide us would really help.

> I’m totally in favour to have more information (and more
> frequent) in -team (the ML).  But I think you have read
> this many and many time in past 5 (or more) years, as
> requiring documentation so we know what to do next
> without having to ping people for weeks.

+1. The question is a bit what this documentation should look like.
For decades, we've organised business and government institutions in
departments and given them guidelines how to work within their
cages.

Over the last 20 years or so, this structure, has started to fade,
admittedly slowly — it's completely absent in young companies
nowadays. We see almost exlusively process-based approaches, rather
than approaches based on compartmentalisation of task categories.

So then, the documentation we need is a timeline, and dependencies
between tasks. And to me, this sounds like a project management
tool, as this sort of topologically sorted graph is just hard to
maintain in a wiki.

-- 
 .''`.   martin f. krafft  @martinkrafft
: :'  :  DebConf orga team
`. `'`
  `-  DebConf16: Cape Town: https://wiki.debconf.org/wiki/DebConf16
  DebConf17 in your country? https://wiki.debconf.org/wiki/DebConf17


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Re: [Debconf-team] DebConf meetings this week

[Eric Dantan Rzewnicki]

On Mon, Sep 21, 2015 at 12:16:11PM +0200, Bernelle Verster wrote:
> I hope in due course we can make these meeting notifications smoother,
> suggestions welcome.

Perhaps listing what's scheduled for the next 2 weeks would help.

-Eric
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Re: [Debconf-team] DebConf meetings this week

[Margarita Manterola]

Hi,

On Mon, Sep 21, 2015 at 10:29 PM, Philip Hands  wrote:
> Could someone explain the purpose of the co-ordination team?

>From last week's meeting [1]:

This team is in charge of facilitating the work of other teams. This
means that it makes sure that people are not blocked, providing help
in the form of people-power and advice. Additionally, it makes sure
that deadlines are met, that teams do their job and that they are
talking to each other.

[1] The meeting was called by the chairs, who decided to invite
Stefano, Bernelle and me. I complained pretty loudly about the
privateness of the meeting and the separate channel, but my complaints
were not enough to change that particular meeting.  The team mission
reproduced above was pretty much the only thing that we could agree
on.

-- 
Besos,
Marga
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Re: [Debconf-team] DebConf meetings this week

[Philip Hands]

Margarita Manterola  writes:

> Hi,
>
> On Mon, Sep 21, 2015 at 10:29 PM, Philip Hands  wrote:
>> Could someone explain the purpose of the co-ordination team?
>
> From last week's meeting [1]:
>
> This team is in charge of facilitating the work of other teams. This
> means that it makes sure that people are not blocked, providing help
> in the form of people-power and advice. Additionally, it makes sure
> that deadlines are met, that teams do their job and that they are
> talking to each other.
>
> [1] The meeting was called by the chairs, who decided to invite
> Stefano, Bernelle and me. I complained pretty loudly about the
> privateness of the meeting and the separate channel, but my complaints
> were not enough to change that particular meeting.  The team mission
> reproduced above was pretty much the only thing that we could agree
> on.

Wow!  "Motherhood and Apple Pie"

That would seem to be a definition of what anyone in orga should be
doing by default, at all times, assuming they are paying the slightest
attention.

If we need to set up a new team for that, we are in deep shit.

Cheers, Phil.
-- 
|)|  Philip Hands  [+44 (0)20 8530 9560]  HANDS.COM Ltd.
|-|  http://www.hands.com/http://ftp.uk.debian.org/
|(|  Hugo-Klemm-Strasse 34,   21075 Hamburg,GERMANY


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Re: [Debconf-team] DebConf meetings this week

[Jonathan Carter]

On 21/09/2015 22:37, Stefano Rivera wrote:
> Hi Philip (2015.09.21_22:29:32_+0200)
>>> Last week's Monday meeting was clearly a one-off.
>>
>> Obviously I missed the relevant memo.
> 
> No, it was an intentionally private meeting, to try to form the core of
> the coordination team. The privateness of it has already caused a
> kerfuffle. I'd recommend forgetting about it.

I tried to follow your advice and forget it, but to be honest I'm quite
hurt by it. To form a coordination team in private and in secrecy so
that "things can get done" is pretty awful and not conducive to having
an open and transparent community.

I'm sorry that a 'kerfuffle' about this is uncomfortable for those
responsible for this, but doing such things is a violation of trust and
I couldn't just turn a blind eye to it.

-Jonathan

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Re: [Debconf-team] DebConf meetings this week

[Allison Randal]

On 09/22/2015 02:27 AM, Jonathan Carter wrote:
> 
> I tried to follow your advice and forget it, but to be honest I'm quite
> hurt by it. To form a coordination team in private and in secrecy so
> that "things can get done" is pretty awful and not conducive to having
> an open and transparent community.
> 
> I'm sorry that a 'kerfuffle' about this is uncomfortable for those
> responsible for this, but doing such things is a violation of trust and
> I couldn't just turn a blind eye to it.

Saying "forget about it" isn't trying to sweep it under the carpet. It's
saying it was a mistake and won't happen again.

Allison
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Re: [Debconf-team] DebConf meetings this week

[Laura Arjona Reina]

Dear all

El 21/09/15 a las 12:16, Bernelle Verster escribió:
> 
> 
> On Monday, 21 September 2015, martin f krafft  > wrote:
> 
> also sprach Margarita Manterola  > [2015-09-21 11:45 +0200]:
> > I think holding the coordination meeting on a separate channel is a
> > very very big mistake. This is THE meeting that should happen on
> > #debconf-team, as opposed to the DC16 team meetings which can
> > perfectly well happen on the DC16 channel.
> >
> > I urge anyone that participates in this meeting to do it on
> > #debconf-team not #debconf-coordination.
> 
> For the record, I agree 100% with Marga, including the urgency she
> purports.
> 
>  
> Noted, awaiting someone from coord to confirm a new day/time.
> 
> Another meeting happening today at 14:00 UTC is the Publicity meeting,
> on #debian-publicity
> https://wiki.debian.org/Teams/Publicity/Meetings/ 

I'll attend the Publicity Team meeting with my publicity and
debconf-publicity hats; and report in the debconf-team weekly meeting,
or fallback to the mailing list.

Regards

> 
> I hope in due course we can make these meeting notifications smoother,
> suggestions welcome.
> 
> 
> --
>  .''`.   martin f. krafft >
> @martinkrafft
> : :'  :  DebConf orga team
> `. `'`
>   `-  DebConf16: Cape Town: https://wiki.debconf.org/wiki/DebConf16
>   DebConf17 in your country? https://wiki.debconf.org/wiki/DebConf17
> 
> 
> 
> ___
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-- 
Laura Arjona
https://wiki.debian.org/LauraArjona
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Re: [Debconf-team] DebConf meetings this week

[martin f krafft]

also sprach Margarita Manterola  [2015-09-21 11:45 
+0200]:
> I think holding the coordination meeting on a separate channel is a
> very very big mistake. This is THE meeting that should happen on
> #debconf-team, as opposed to the DC16 team meetings which can
> perfectly well happen on the DC16 channel.
> 
> I urge anyone that participates in this meeting to do it on
> #debconf-team not #debconf-coordination.

For the record, I agree 100% with Marga, including the urgency she
purports.

-- 
 .''`.   martin f. krafft  @martinkrafft
: :'  :  DebConf orga team
`. `'`
  `-  DebConf16: Cape Town: https://wiki.debconf.org/wiki/DebConf16
  DebConf17 in your country? https://wiki.debconf.org/wiki/DebConf17


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Re: [Debconf-team] DebConf meetings this week

[Stefano Rivera]

Hi Bernelle (2015.09.21_12:16:11_+0200)
> Noted, awaiting someone from coord to confirm a new day/time.

Err, we went through the whole dudle for scheduling meetings and got
Wednseday. I don't know where the Monday thing comes from.

Last week's Monday meeting was clearly a one-off.

SR

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Re: [Debconf-team] DebConf meetings this week

[Margarita Manterola]

Hi,

On Mon, Sep 21, 2015 at 11:38 AM, Bernelle Verster  wrote:
>> > 1. Coord meeting, Monday 21 September (today) 16:00UTC (18:00
>> >SAST) on #debconf-coordination
>> A bit short notice, and I wonder why it's on a separate channel.
> From my perspective (as the person who's been doing meetings for dc16 for
> the past year and in no other capacity), coord can have their own channel
> just like e.g. infra has their own channel.
> It's short notice because I sent this on a Monday and so far (AFAIK) these
> meetings have been weekly on a Monday, so coincidental if unfortunate.

It was only held once. And at a different time. And it had been agreed
that it would NOT be held again on #debconf-coordination.

I think holding the coordination meeting on a separate channel is a
very very big mistake. This is THE meeting that should happen on
#debconf-team, as opposed to the DC16 team meetings which can
perfectly well happen on the DC16 channel.

I urge anyone that participates in this meeting to do it on
#debconf-team not #debconf-coordination.

That said, I can't make that time. I don't know how the time was
decided, but I won't be able to take part of the meeting.

-- 
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Marga
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Re: [Debconf-team] DebConf meetings this week

[Philip Hands]

Stefano Rivera  writes:

> Hi Bernelle (2015.09.21_12:16:11_+0200)
>> Noted, awaiting someone from coord to confirm a new day/time.
>
> Err, we went through the whole dudle for scheduling meetings and got
> Wednseday. I don't know where the Monday thing comes from.
>
> Last week's Monday meeting was clearly a one-off.

Obviously I missed the relevant memo.

Could someone explain the purpose of the co-ordination team?

Cheers, Phil.
-- 
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|-|  http://www.hands.com/http://ftp.uk.debian.org/
|(|  Hugo-Klemm-Strasse 34,   21075 Hamburg,GERMANY


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Re: [Debconf-team] DebConf meetings this week

[Stefano Rivera]

Hi Philip (2015.09.21_22:29:32_+0200)
> > Last week's Monday meeting was clearly a one-off.
> 
> Obviously I missed the relevant memo.

No, it was an intentionally private meeting, to try to form the core of
the coordination team. The privateness of it has already caused a
kerfuffle. I'd recommend forgetting about it.

> Could someone explain the purpose of the co-ordination team?

I'd say, to keep on top of the important issues, and make sure DebConf
happens. But everyone will probably give you a different definition.

SR

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Re: [Debconf-team] DebConf meetings this week

[Bernelle Verster]

On Monday, 21 September 2015, martin f krafft  wrote:

> also sprach Margarita Manterola >
> [2015-09-21 11:45 +0200]:
> > I think holding the coordination meeting on a separate channel is a
> > very very big mistake. This is THE meeting that should happen on
> > #debconf-team, as opposed to the DC16 team meetings which can
> > perfectly well happen on the DC16 channel.
> >
> > I urge anyone that participates in this meeting to do it on
> > #debconf-team not #debconf-coordination.
>
> For the record, I agree 100% with Marga, including the urgency she
> purports.


Noted, awaiting someone from coord to confirm a new day/time.

Another meeting happening today at 14:00 UTC is the Publicity meeting, on
#debian-publicity
https://wiki.debian.org/Teams/Publicity/Meetings/

I hope in due course we can make these meeting notifications smoother,
suggestions welcome.

>
> --
>  .''`.   martin f. krafft >
> @martinkrafft
> : :'  :  DebConf orga team
> `. `'`
>   `-  DebConf16: Cape Town: https://wiki.debconf.org/wiki/DebConf16
>   DebConf17 in your country? https://wiki.debconf.org/wiki/DebConf17
>
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