Glynn Foster wrote: > This is especially hard because none of us have any clue about how to > form an agenda on IRC. Due to the global reach of OpenSolaris, it's > almost impossible (realistically) to have everyone in the channel at any > one time.
my observations: Without an agenda, the meeting is doomed to be a farce. IRC is good for some stuff, as is email and wiki. I can see how a wiki (for shared proposal/amendment authoring) and IRC (for related discussion) might work, with email being used to formally announce things like ballots. IRC by itself is useless in a global environment because it disenfranchises some set of people simply because they are sleeping. It possibly could be made to work by artificially slowing down the pace of discussions, but doing so would make IRC no different than email. As others have said, this meeting really needed to have an agenda, with all topics finalized in advance and discussions, motions and other "business" given "time certain" status on it, with at least 12 and probably 24 hours of open discussion before a question can be called. This argues for having very few things on the agenda, otherwise the meeting could drag on forever. (wait, isn't it doing that already? :-) The *idea* of having a global real-time meeting is praiseworthy; the problem is that it doesn't actually work. This is, BTW, the same problem that the ARC is facing - how do we devise a structure that empowers and enables everyone, regardless of where they reside? I fear that the answers will be the same: either ignore the problem and hold a short, multi-timezone unfriendly meeting, or do away with the idea and need for such a meeting in the first place by inventing alternative asynchronous federated or distributed mechanisms. -John
