Hi all, (just got back from a very nice long weekend at the GSoC summit in San Jose :))
We had a nice discussion with Brad and Karen over lunch at the GSoC summit. What came up is having regular board meetings. I think this would be great for us and make things a bit more structured / easier to follow. How about we schedule a meeting (for board only) once every month, e.g. every first Monday of the month? What do you think?
cheers, Johan
I would be in favor of it. I do think that we may still want to shoot for bi-weekly in the meantime though to try and hammer more things out for a LGM-linked hackfest. We're still trying to figure that out and I think there is much more discussion surrounding it than what regular meetings will look like once we've gotten this under our belt.
Cheers, Josh
On Mon, Oct 27, 2014 at 2:19 PM, Johan Engelen <j.b.c.engelen@...51...> wrote:
Hi all, (just got back from a very nice long weekend at the GSoC summit in San Jose :))
We had a nice discussion with Brad and Karen over lunch at the GSoC summit. What came up is having regular board meetings. I think this would be great for us and make things a bit more structured / easier to follow. How about we schedule a meeting (for board only) once every month, e.g. every first Monday of the month? What do you think?
cheers, Johan
Inkscape-board mailing list Inkscape-board@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/inkscape-board
I definitely think having regular board meetings is a good idea. Once a month seems like a good frequency for a meeting where we expect board members to show up. We can certainly have more frequent meetings when necessary, as in our lead up to the hacking session.
Tav
On Mon, 2014-10-27 at 15:08 -0700, Josh Andler wrote:
I would be in favor of it. I do think that we may still want to shoot for bi-weekly in the meantime though to try and hammer more things out for a LGM-linked hackfest. We're still trying to figure that out and I think there is much more discussion surrounding it than what regular meetings will look like once we've gotten this under our belt.
Cheers, Josh
On Mon, Oct 27, 2014 at 2:19 PM, Johan Engelen <j.b.c.engelen@...51...> wrote:
Hi all, (just got back from a very nice long weekend at the GSoC summit in San Jose :))
We had a nice discussion with Brad and Karen over lunch at the GSoC summit. What came up is having regular board meetings. I think this would be great for us and make things a bit more structured / easier to follow. How about we schedule a meeting (for board only) once every month, e.g. every first Monday of the month? What do you think?
cheers, Johan
Inkscape-board mailing list Inkscape-board@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/inkscape-board
Inkscape-board mailing list Inkscape-board@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/inkscape-board
On Mon, Oct 27, 2014, at 03:23 PM, Tavmjong Bah wrote:
I definitely think having regular board meetings is a good idea. Once a month seems like a good frequency for a meeting where we expect board members to show up. We can certainly have more frequent meetings when necessary, as in our lead up to the hacking session.
Bi-weekly sounds good to me, with 'regular monthly' being a good end goal.
On 27-10-2014 23:08, Josh Andler wrote:
I would be in favor of it. I do think that we may still want to shoot for bi-weekly in the meantime though to try and hammer more things out for a LGM-linked hackfest. We're still trying to figure that out and I think there is much more discussion surrounding it than what regular meetings will look like once we've gotten this under our belt.
Yeah, I meant apart from the current hackfest meetings. Bi-weekly for now is good.
I meant for the monthly thing to go into the FSA.
Cheers, Josh
On Mon, Oct 27, 2014 at 2:19 PM, Johan Engelen <j.b.c.engelen@...51...> wrote:
Hi all, (just got back from a very nice long weekend at the GSoC summit in San Jose :))
We had a nice discussion with Brad and Karen over lunch at the GSoC summit. What came up is having regular board meetings. I think this would be great for us and make things a bit more structured / easier to follow. How about we schedule a meeting (for board only) once every month, e.g. every first Monday of the month? What do you think?
cheers, Johan
Inkscape-board mailing list Inkscape-board@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/inkscape-board
On Mon, Oct 27, 2014 at 10:19:31PM +0100, Johan Engelen wrote:
Hi all, (just got back from a very nice long weekend at the GSoC summit in San Jose :))
We had a nice discussion with Brad and Karen over lunch at the GSoC summit.
Cool, can you give us a more elaborated report on your meeting with them?
What came up is having regular board meetings. I think this would be great for us and make things a bit more structured / easier to follow. How about we schedule a meeting (for board only) once every month, e.g. every first Monday of the month? What do you think?
A monthly or bi-weekly meeting would be fine with me, if someone will volunteer to send out day-before reminders.
One thing I wonder though, is do we really have enough to discuss as a group? This mailing list tends to be very low traffic...
Also, I'm a bit concerned about attendance - the last hackfest meeting had only two people present. :-(
Perhaps we could do a trial run of say 5 meetings, and then decide if there seems to be plenty to discuss and attendance remains high through all 5, to continue?
Bryce
On Mon, Oct 27, 2014, at 08:58 PM, Bryce Harrington wrote:
A monthly or bi-weekly meeting would be fine with me, if someone will volunteer to send out day-before reminders.
One thing I wonder though, is do we really have enough to discuss as a group? This mailing list tends to be very low traffic...
Also, I'm a bit concerned about attendance - the last hackfest meeting had only two people present. :-(
Perhaps we could do a trial run of say 5 meetings, and then decide if there seems to be plenty to discuss and attendance remains high through all 5, to continue?
I can coordinate the notices. Plus I believe that we can get things done quickly if we treat them somewhat like Scrum stand-up meetings.
BTW, we might want to track a few things like conflicts, time suggestions, etc. (I know that I missed one of the meetings due to flying for work stuffs). Not that we'll want to play big brother or anything, but by being aware of the common interruptions we can mitigate their impact.
On Mon, 2014-10-27 at 21:06 -0700, Jon A. Cruz wrote:
On Mon, Oct 27, 2014, at 08:58 PM, Bryce Harrington wrote:
A monthly or bi-weekly meeting would be fine with me, if someone will volunteer to send out day-before reminders.
One thing I wonder though, is do we really have enough to discuss as a group? This mailing list tends to be very low traffic...
Also, I'm a bit concerned about attendance - the last hackfest meeting had only two people present. :-(
Perhaps we could do a trial run of say 5 meetings, and then decide if there seems to be plenty to discuss and attendance remains high through all 5, to continue?
I can coordinate the notices. Plus I believe that we can get things done quickly if we treat them somewhat like Scrum stand-up meetings.
BTW, we might want to track a few things like conflicts, time suggestions, etc. (I know that I missed one of the meetings due to flying for work stuffs). Not that we'll want to play big brother or anything, but by being aware of the common interruptions we can mitigate their impact.
I think that having the meetings would be good, and the nice part about the reminder e-mail is that it gives people a chance to send regrets about conflicts. I'm sure Jon's situation is not unique, though I think I just forgot to put the last hackfest meeting on my calendar.
Ted
On 28-10-2014 4:58, Bryce Harrington wrote:
On Mon, Oct 27, 2014 at 10:19:31PM +0100, Johan Engelen wrote:
Hi all, (just got back from a very nice long weekend at the GSoC summit in San Jose :))
We had a nice discussion with Brad and Karen over lunch at the GSoC summit.
Cool, can you give us a more elaborated report on your meeting with them?
What came up is having regular board meetings. I think this would be great for us and make things a bit more structured / easier to follow. How about we schedule a meeting (for board only) once every month, e.g. every first Monday of the month? What do you think?
A monthly or bi-weekly meeting would be fine with me, if someone will volunteer to send out day-before reminders.
Monthly. On an easy, fixed schedule or with a new date determined at the end of each meeting.
One thing I wonder though, is do we really have enough to discuss as a group? This mailing list tends to be very low traffic...
Even if we don't have anything to discuss, that is fine. We can always cancel a meeting. But I am not afraid there will not be enough to discuss; every month there have been emails here.
Also, I'm a bit concerned about attendance - the last hackfest meeting had only two people present. :-(
Board meetings are mandatory. The point of scheduling board meetings, is so that we actually have meetings and that we can count on people being there, for example to vote on things. The meetings don't have to be long, if there is nothing big, 15 minute friendly chat is fine too.
(Just in case, I want to make clear that the hackfest meeting is something separate from board meetings.)
Perhaps we could do a trial run of say 5 meetings, and then decide if there seems to be plenty to discuss and attendance remains high through all 5, to continue?
Attendance should be mandatory, and so if attendance is low, that would mean something bad.
ciao, Johan
On 27-10-2014 23:45, Jon A. Cruz wrote:
On Mon, Oct 27, 2014, at 03:23 PM, Tavmjong Bah wrote:
I definitely think having regular board meetings is a good idea. Once a month seems like a good frequency for a meeting where we expect board members to show up. We can certainly have more frequent meetings when necessary, as in our lead up to the hacking session.
Bi-weekly sounds good to me, with 'regular monthly' being a good end goal.
Bi-weekly is too much, I feel. Let's have one each month. The hacking session meetings are not board meetings, so fall outside this schedule.
-Johan
On Tue, Oct 28, 2014 at 10:13:02PM +0100, Johan Engelen wrote:
On 28-10-2014 4:58, Bryce Harrington wrote:
On Mon, Oct 27, 2014 at 10:19:31PM +0100, Johan Engelen wrote:
Hi all, (just got back from a very nice long weekend at the GSoC summit in San Jose :))
We had a nice discussion with Brad and Karen over lunch at the GSoC summit.
Cool, can you give us a more elaborated report on your meeting with them?
ping?
What came up is having regular board meetings.
Why? What is the specific problem(s) that meetings would solve?
I think this
would be great for us and make things a bit more structured / easier to follow.
How would irc meetings make things more structured?
IRC's advantage over email is that it is *less* structured, which is better for freeform discussions.
How about we schedule a meeting (for board only) once every
month, e.g. every first Monday of the month? What do you think?
A monthly or bi-weekly meeting would be fine with me, if someone will volunteer to send out day-before reminders...
I'm recinding my 'fine with me' since some of the additional discussion has raised some red flags for me.
Monthly. On an easy, fixed schedule or with a new date determined at the end of each meeting.
One thing I wonder though, is do we really have enough to discuss as a group? This mailing list tends to be very low traffic...
Even if we don't have anything to discuss, that is fine. We can always cancel a meeting. But I am not afraid there will not be enough to discuss; every month there have been emails here.
Holding regular meetings implies that each of us must make time commitments to attend; this is not easy for everyone, who might handle the asynchronicity of email just fine.
Regular meetings also imply several additional chores, particularly if we want to do meetings "right". That means we need agendas set, reminders sent, minutes and vote results written and posted officially, irc logs archives, action items tracked and followed up on, and attendance issues dealt with. For mailing list discussions, none of these are issues and you just focus on following up on action items. Documenting our votes is pretty trivial - I just point to the mailing list thread.
If we don't even know whether we will have anything worth discussing, then that's going to be a lot of overhead from all of us for maybe nothing. With mailing list "meetings", if there's nothing to discuss - presto, no email.
Each of us is busy, and by definition of being Inkscape developers we'd like to use our scant time to develop Inkscape. So we need to really consider whether adding more demands on our time managing meetings help us as a project vs. distract our attention from what we really want to do. We're developers, not managers. (Indeed, this is a big worry of mine with fundraising - are the resulting funds going to offset the effort and attention we spent in raising it to begin with? If so, then we ought to just kill the fundraising and focus on where are skills and interests actually lay, and go back to not worrying about the money.)
I am somewhat gun-shy about having formal meetings (either IRC or phone) due to past experience (WorldForge via irc, uncounted times at OSDL both phone and IRC, thrice at Canonical all phone). The first few meetings always seem to go well, but then attendance tapers off, action items fall by the wayside, and all the remaining responsibilities and everyone's unfinished action items devolve to whatever poor soul stuck around and attended reliably.
Also, I'm a bit concerned about attendance - the last hackfest meeting had only two people present. :-(
Board meetings are mandatory.
Bad idea. Making meetings mandatory doesn't make them productive or useful.
Look, we're all volunteers here. Many of us have day jobs or school, some are parents or have family needing care or like long breaks to travel unplugged or suffer some temporary hardship, some of us just plain get burnt out and need a break. Your life happens, and then Inkscape happens in the time that remains. And that's fine, you're a volunteer and the project is lucky to have whatever you give.
Making meetings mandatory goes against the reality of our real lives.
Besides, to make something mandatory you have to have some means of enforcement. We can't kick each other off the board, we're not each other's bosses.
The point of scheduling board meetings, is so that we actually have meetings and that we can count on people being there, for example to vote on things. The meetings don't have to be long, if there is nothing big, 15 minute friendly chat is fine too.
Having discussions on IRC is of course just fine, and even organizing one-off group meetings for brainstorming sessions or hashing out differences or planning summits or etc. can be very productive and good.
I think the hackfest meetings are okay - they're voluntary, temporary, with a well-defined goal and specific due date.
But scheduling a fixed-point date and time meeting is liable to run into conflicts. Try telling your wife you need to come back from vacation a day early for your Inkscape meeting. Timezone conflicts can be harsh too (try scheduling Europeans, Americans, and Australians into the same meeting, I dare you). We are *not* going to be able to count on everyone being there all the time.
In regards to voting, I think this will end up just complicating things for me more. Right now, all voting happens on the mailing list, where it's automatically archived and properly threaded, and each person's vote is traceable via a specific email to their email address and can be verified against their personal email archives. The entirety of the debate is archived in one place for future reference. The vote tally can be independently verified, publically referenced, and permalinks submitted to SFC. We have this all working fairly smoothly.
With IRC voting, all we'll have as an official record is the IRC log if someone remembers to save it and post it to our website. Your voter identification is via *ahem* FreeNode nicks. IRC logs can be quite easily tampered with (I should know: I do so every meeting before posting them to the website!)
And in reality I think we'd end up mixing some votes cast via IRC, and some via email by those who didn't attend. Which makes the voting process all the more complicated for me to manage, and for others to verify against.
(Just in case, I want to make clear that the hackfest meeting is something separate from board meetings.)
Perhaps we could do a trial run of say 5 meetings, and then decide if there seems to be plenty to discuss and attendance remains high through all 5, to continue?
Attendance should be mandatory, and so if attendance is low, that would mean something bad.
No, more likely it would mean that people just find meetings boring and useless. Which would hardly be a unique discovery. ;-)
-1 to mandatory meetings. We have no means of enforcement, and I'm not seeing the necessity. I think it'll end up consuming time better spent on development work.
Who feels strongly that we need to have regular meetings? And why?
Bryce
That's a pretty long response Bryce! :) I'll try to clarify my intent below. It is unfortunate that we cannot have these important discussions in person, and I hate email for this :'(
I remember Martin's "board-aggravation" email pretty well, and (if perhaps by the wrong method) it made me realize that I, we, the board, should take our responsibilities more seriously (or should step down if I don't want that).
On 29-10-2014 9:10, Bryce Harrington wrote:
On Tue, Oct 28, 2014 at 10:13:02PM +0100, Johan Engelen wrote:
On 28-10-2014 4:58, Bryce Harrington wrote:
On Mon, Oct 27, 2014 at 10:19:31PM +0100, Johan Engelen wrote:
Hi all, (just got back from a very nice long weekend at the GSoC summit in San Jose :))
We had a nice discussion with Brad and Karen over lunch at the GSoC summit.
Cool, can you give us a more elaborated report on your meeting with them?
ping?
What came up is having regular board meetings.
Why? What is the specific problem(s) that meetings would solve?
I will come back to this later, but the trigger for this was a discussion on how to resolve board inactivity. The FSA draft contains a section on how to remove people from the board (if the rest of the board so chooses), and we spoke about making a more objective 'rule' that would not require nasty discussions. One proposal was "miss 3 meetings in a row
For me, regular meetings could help reach timely responses or decisions. I think it will help underline the responsibilities as a board member, especially now that we start looking into funded development.
I think this
would be great for us and make things a bit more structured / easier to follow.
How would irc meetings make things more structured?
IRC's advantage over email is that it is *less* structured, which is better for freeform discussions.
Sorry for the ambiguity. I meant that regular meetings would force us into a more structured mode of operation. In my opinion, email threads are not ideal in actually discussing matters. I find often on our board and dev lists that arguments are not answered by counter-arguments, but rather by bringing more stuff into the discussion and after some time no-one knows what the discussion was about and no decision / end is reached. I hoped that a meeting would be easier for the actual discussing of matters. I agree with you that email is good when things need more thought or reading. An e-mail thread and then after that an IRC meeting would be nice, I think.
I did not intend the meetings to replace email. I intended the meetings for actually interacting with each other! :-)
How about we schedule a meeting (for board only) once every
month, e.g. every first Monday of the month? What do you think?
A monthly or bi-weekly meeting would be fine with me, if someone will volunteer to send out day-before reminders...
I'm recinding my 'fine with me' since some of the additional discussion has raised some red flags for me.
Monthly. On an easy, fixed schedule or with a new date determined at the end of each meeting.
One thing I wonder though, is do we really have enough to discuss as a group? This mailing list tends to be very low traffic...
Even if we don't have anything to discuss, that is fine. We can always cancel a meeting. But I am not afraid there will not be enough to discuss; every month there have been emails here.
Holding regular meetings implies that each of us must make time commitments to attend; this is not easy for everyone, who might handle the asynchronicity of email just fine.
Regular meetings also imply several additional chores, particularly if we want to do meetings "right". That means we need agendas set, reminders sent, minutes and vote results written and posted officially, irc logs archives, action items tracked and followed up on, and attendance issues dealt with. For mailing list discussions, none of these are issues and you just focus on following up on action items. Documenting our votes is pretty trivial - I just point to the mailing list thread.
Because I did not intend the meetings to replace email, these tasks are not necessary.
If we don't even know whether we will have anything worth discussing, then that's going to be a lot of overhead from all of us for maybe nothing. With mailing list "meetings", if there's nothing to discuss - presto, no email.
Each of us is busy, and by definition of being Inkscape developers we'd like to use our scant time to develop Inkscape. So we need to really consider whether adding more demands on our time managing meetings help us as a project vs. distract our attention from what we really want to do. We're developers, not managers. (Indeed, this is a big worry of mine with fundraising - are the resulting funds going to offset the effort and attention we spent in raising it to begin with? If so, then we ought to just kill the fundraising and focus on where are skills and interests actually lay, and go back to not worrying about the money.)
I am somewhat gun-shy about having formal meetings (either IRC or phone) due to past experience (WorldForge via irc, uncounted times at OSDL both phone and IRC, thrice at Canonical all phone). The first few meetings always seem to go well, but then attendance tapers off, action items fall by the wayside, and all the remaining responsibilities and everyone's unfinished action items devolve to whatever poor soul stuck around and attended reliably.
Also, I'm a bit concerned about attendance - the last hackfest meeting had only two people present. :-(
Board meetings are mandatory.
Bad idea. Making meetings mandatory doesn't make them productive or useful.
If you mean that adding the property "mandatory" will not make an unproductive meeting into a productive one, I agree. That is not the intent of making a meeting mandatory. A mandatory meeting would result in regular interaction between members, e.g. for obtaining an instant response to a particular question.
Look, we're all volunteers here. Many of us have day jobs or school, some are parents or have family needing care or like long breaks to travel unplugged or suffer some temporary hardship, some of us just plain get burnt out and need a break. Your life happens, and then Inkscape happens in the time that remains. And that's fine, you're a volunteer and the project is lucky to have whatever you give.
I agree, of course we are all volunteers. But I think that being a board member comes with responsibilities too, including a time commitment.
Making meetings mandatory goes against the reality of our real lives.
Besides, to make something mandatory you have to have some means of enforcement. We can't kick each other off the board, we're not each other's bosses.
As far as I understood, our FSA draft already contains language that does allow us to kick someone off the board. As it should, in my opinion. As we assume our responsibilities, we need to be sure we can carry them.
The point of scheduling board meetings, is so that we actually have meetings and that we can count on people being there, for example to vote on things. The meetings don't have to be long, if there is nothing big, 15 minute friendly chat is fine too.
Having discussions on IRC is of course just fine, and even organizing one-off group meetings for brainstorming sessions or hashing out differences or planning summits or etc. can be very productive and good.
I think the hackfest meetings are okay - they're voluntary, temporary, with a well-defined goal and specific due date.
But scheduling a fixed-point date and time meeting is liable to run into conflicts. Try telling your wife you need to come back from vacation a day early for your Inkscape meeting. Timezone conflicts can be harsh too (try scheduling Europeans, Americans, and Australians into the same meeting, I dare you). We are *not* going to be able to count on everyone being there all the time.
Well, we have only Europeans and Americans, so that makes it much easier. :) Of course no-one has to come back from vacation earlier. There are plenty of valid reasons why someone would not be able to join the meeting from time to time. If someone really cannot find the time for a meeting over an extended period of time, I don't think he is fit for being a board member. I think we should be able to schedule meetings such that each member can be present on most of the occasions, no? (for example, we could alternate between EU and USA convenient time slots)
In regards to voting, I think this will end up just complicating things for me more. Right now, all voting happens on the mailing list, where it's automatically archived and properly threaded, and each person's vote is traceable via a specific email to their email address and can be verified against their personal email archives. The entirety of the debate is archived in one place for future reference. The vote tally can be independently verified, publically referenced, and permalinks submitted to SFC. We have this all working fairly smoothly.
With IRC voting, all we'll have as an official record is the IRC log if someone remembers to save it and post it to our website. Your voter identification is via *ahem* FreeNode nicks. IRC logs can be quite easily tampered with (I should know: I do so every meeting before posting them to the website!)
And in reality I think we'd end up mixing some votes cast via IRC, and some via email by those who didn't attend. Which makes the voting process all the more complicated for me to manage, and for others to verify against.
Perhaps the voting was a bad idea, or what I actually meant was to force people to vote timely. It is easy to still cast votes (and write the to-be-voted-on proposal) through email.
(Just in case, I want to make clear that the hackfest meeting is something separate from board meetings.)
Perhaps we could do a trial run of say 5 meetings, and then decide if there seems to be plenty to discuss and attendance remains high through all 5, to continue?
Attendance should be mandatory, and so if attendance is low, that would mean something bad.
No, more likely it would mean that people just find meetings boring and useless. Which would hardly be a unique discovery. ;-)
-1 to mandatory meetings. We have no means of enforcement, and I'm not seeing the necessity. I think it'll end up consuming time better spent on development work.
Who feels strongly that we need to have regular meetings? And why?
I do not feel very strongly about having regular meetings. But I do think they will help us.
If there is a will to have these meetings, we can easily make them happen. If there is no such will, then this whole discussion is in vain anyway.
Throughout this, I do not think "not having time" is a valid excuse; as board members, I think we owe it to the community to reserve time for board issues, besides development. If someone wants to be a developer, that is perfectly possible without being a board member (and I reckon he will be much happier off).
regards, Johan
On Wed, 2014-10-29 at 19:41 +0100, Johan Engelen wrote:
That's a pretty long response Bryce! :) I'll try to clarify my intent below. It is unfortunate that we cannot have these important discussions in person, and I hate email for this :'(
I remember Martin's "board-aggravation" email pretty well, and (if perhaps by the wrong method) it made me realize that I, we, the board, should take our responsibilities more seriously (or should step down if I don't want that).
On 29-10-2014 9:10, Bryce Harrington wrote:
On Tue, Oct 28, 2014 at 10:13:02PM +0100, Johan Engelen wrote:
On 28-10-2014 4:58, Bryce Harrington wrote:
On Mon, Oct 27, 2014 at 10:19:31PM +0100, Johan Engelen wrote:
Hi all, (just got back from a very nice long weekend at the GSoC summit in San Jose :))
We had a nice discussion with Brad and Karen over lunch at the GSoC summit.
Cool, can you give us a more elaborated report on your meeting with them?
ping?
I will expand on this with a report on the whole weekend after I get back to France next week.
What came up is having regular board meetings.
Why? What is the specific problem(s) that meetings would solve?
I will come back to this later, but the trigger for this was a discussion on how to resolve board inactivity. The FSA draft contains a section on how to remove people from the board (if the rest of the board so chooses), and we spoke about making a more objective 'rule' that would not require nasty discussions. One proposal was "miss 3 meetings in a row
For me, regular meetings could help reach timely responses or decisions. I think it will help underline the responsibilities as a board member, especially now that we start looking into funded development.
One thing that has become apparent over the last few years attending LGM and the GSoC mentors meeting is that Inkscape has a much smaller and less active community that other similar Open Source projects. (While not exactly comparing oranges to oranges, Drupal has 30,000 code contributors.)
We have made some good steps in building community. Supporting developers attending LGM worked really well. The Toronto hackfest should keep the momentum going.
Having regular meetings with an active board is one step to building up a larger community. People see that things are being discussed, decisions made, etc.
I think this
would be great for us and make things a bit more structured / easier to follow.
How would irc meetings make things more structured?
IRC's advantage over email is that it is *less* structured, which is better for freeform discussions.
Sorry for the ambiguity. I meant that regular meetings would force us into a more structured mode of operation. In my opinion, email threads are not ideal in actually discussing matters. I find often on our board and dev lists that arguments are not answered by counter-arguments, but rather by bringing more stuff into the discussion and after some time no-one knows what the discussion was about and no decision / end is reached. I hoped that a meeting would be easier for the actual discussing of matters. I agree with you that email is good when things need more thought or reading. An e-mail thread and then after that an IRC meeting would be nice, I think.
I did not intend the meetings to replace email. I intended the meetings for actually interacting with each other! :-)
irc is also a good place to do some brain-storming. (Meeting in person is even better.)
How about we schedule a meeting (for board only) once every
month, e.g. every first Monday of the month? What do you think?
A monthly or bi-weekly meeting would be fine with me, if someone will volunteer to send out day-before reminders...
I'm recinding my 'fine with me' since some of the additional discussion has raised some red flags for me.
Monthly. On an easy, fixed schedule or with a new date determined at the end of each meeting.
One thing I wonder though, is do we really have enough to discuss as a group? This mailing list tends to be very low traffic...
Hopefully, with funding developers, with arranging for hack fests we will be discussing more things and have more need to meet regularly. Meetings are also a place for new ideas to come up.
Even if we don't have anything to discuss, that is fine. We can always cancel a meeting. But I am not afraid there will not be enough to discuss; every month there have been emails here.
Holding regular meetings implies that each of us must make time commitments to attend; this is not easy for everyone, who might handle the asynchronicity of email just fine.
Regular meetings also imply several additional chores, particularly if we want to do meetings "right". That means we need agendas set, reminders sent, minutes and vote results written and posted officially, irc logs archives, action items tracked and followed up on, and attendance issues dealt with. For mailing list discussions, none of these are issues and you just focus on following up on action items. Documenting our votes is pretty trivial - I just point to the mailing list thread.
Because I did not intend the meetings to replace email, these tasks are not necessary.
If we don't even know whether we will have anything worth discussing, then that's going to be a lot of overhead from all of us for maybe nothing. With mailing list "meetings", if there's nothing to discuss - presto, no email.
Each of us is busy, and by definition of being Inkscape developers we'd like to use our scant time to develop Inkscape. So we need to really consider whether adding more demands on our time managing meetings help us as a project vs. distract our attention from what we really want to do. We're developers, not managers. (Indeed, this is a big worry of mine with fundraising - are the resulting funds going to offset the effort and attention we spent in raising it to begin with? If so, then we ought to just kill the fundraising and focus on where are skills and interests actually lay, and go back to not worrying about the money.)
I am somewhat gun-shy about having formal meetings (either IRC or phone) due to past experience (WorldForge via irc, uncounted times at OSDL both phone and IRC, thrice at Canonical all phone). The first few meetings always seem to go well, but then attendance tapers off, action items fall by the wayside, and all the remaining responsibilities and everyone's unfinished action items devolve to whatever poor soul stuck around and attended reliably.
Also, I'm a bit concerned about attendance - the last hackfest meeting had only two people present. :-(
Board meetings are mandatory.
Bad idea. Making meetings mandatory doesn't make them productive or useful.
If you mean that adding the property "mandatory" will not make an unproductive meeting into a productive one, I agree. That is not the intent of making a meeting mandatory. A mandatory meeting would result in regular interaction between members, e.g. for obtaining an instant response to a particular question.
Look, we're all volunteers here. Many of us have day jobs or school, some are parents or have family needing care or like long breaks to travel unplugged or suffer some temporary hardship, some of us just plain get burnt out and need a break. Your life happens, and then Inkscape happens in the time that remains. And that's fine, you're a volunteer and the project is lucky to have whatever you give.
I agree, of course we are all volunteers. But I think that being a board member comes with responsibilities too, including a time commitment.
+1
Making meetings mandatory goes against the reality of our real lives.
Besides, to make something mandatory you have to have some means of enforcement. We can't kick each other off the board, we're not each other's bosses.
As far as I understood, our FSA draft already contains language that does allow us to kick someone off the board. As it should, in my opinion. As we assume our responsibilities, we need to be sure we can carry them.
The point of scheduling board meetings, is so that we actually have meetings and that we can count on people being there, for example to vote on things. The meetings don't have to be long, if there is nothing big, 15 minute friendly chat is fine too.
Having discussions on IRC is of course just fine, and even organizing one-off group meetings for brainstorming sessions or hashing out differences or planning summits or etc. can be very productive and good.
I think the hackfest meetings are okay - they're voluntary, temporary, with a well-defined goal and specific due date.
But scheduling a fixed-point date and time meeting is liable to run into conflicts. Try telling your wife you need to come back from vacation a day early for your Inkscape meeting. Timezone conflicts can be harsh too (try scheduling Europeans, Americans, and Australians into the same meeting, I dare you). We are *not* going to be able to count on everyone being there all the time.
Well, we have only Europeans and Americans, so that makes it much easier. :) Of course no-one has to come back from vacation earlier. There are plenty of valid reasons why someone would not be able to join the meeting from time to time. If someone really cannot find the time for a meeting over an extended period of time, I don't think he is fit for being a board member. I think we should be able to schedule meetings such that each member can be present on most of the occasions, no? (for example, we could alternate between EU and USA convenient time slots)
In regards to voting, I think this will end up just complicating things for me more. Right now, all voting happens on the mailing list, where it's automatically archived and properly threaded, and each person's vote is traceable via a specific email to their email address and can be verified against their personal email archives. The entirety of the debate is archived in one place for future reference. The vote tally can be independently verified, publically referenced, and permalinks submitted to SFC. We have this all working fairly smoothly.
With IRC voting, all we'll have as an official record is the IRC log if someone remembers to save it and post it to our website. Your voter identification is via *ahem* FreeNode nicks. IRC logs can be quite easily tampered with (I should know: I do so every meeting before posting them to the website!)
And in reality I think we'd end up mixing some votes cast via IRC, and some via email by those who didn't attend. Which makes the voting process all the more complicated for me to manage, and for others to verify against.
Perhaps the voting was a bad idea, or what I actually meant was to force people to vote timely. It is easy to still cast votes (and write the to-be-voted-on proposal) through email.
(Just in case, I want to make clear that the hackfest meeting is something separate from board meetings.)
Perhaps we could do a trial run of say 5 meetings, and then decide if there seems to be plenty to discuss and attendance remains high through all 5, to continue?
Attendance should be mandatory, and so if attendance is low, that would mean something bad.
No, more likely it would mean that people just find meetings boring and useless. Which would hardly be a unique discovery. ;-)
-1 to mandatory meetings. We have no means of enforcement, and I'm not seeing the necessity. I think it'll end up consuming time better spent on development work.
Who feels strongly that we need to have regular meetings? And why?
I do not feel very strongly about having regular meetings. But I do think they will help us.
Agreed
If there is a will to have these meetings, we can easily make them happen. If there is no such will, then this whole discussion is in vain anyway.
Throughout this, I do not think "not having time" is a valid excuse; as board members, I think we owe it to the community to reserve time for board issues, besides development. If someone wants to be a developer, that is perfectly possible without being a board member (and I reckon he will be much happier off).
Much agreed.
Tav
On Wed, 2014-10-29 at 20:00 +0100, Tavmjong Bah wrote:
One thing that has become apparent over the last few years attending LGM and the GSoC mentors meeting is that Inkscape has a much smaller and less active community that other similar Open Source projects. (While not exactly comparing oranges to oranges, Drupal has 30,000 code contributors.)
For a better sense of scale, see this graph:
https://inkscape.org/en/gallery/item/944/
Martin,
On Wed, 2014-10-29 at 15:49 -0400, Martin Owens wrote:
On Wed, 2014-10-29 at 20:00 +0100, Tavmjong Bah wrote:
One thing that has become apparent over the last few years attending LGM and the GSoC mentors meeting is that Inkscape has a much smaller and less active community that other similar Open Source projects. (While not exactly comparing oranges to oranges, Drupal has 30,000 code contributors.)
Here is the number of committers with the number of commits for the last year based on "bzr log -v". Note some people appear on more than one line. This is fewer than Martin's analysis shows.
163 <= committer: Johan B. C. Engelen <j.b.c.engelen@...51...> 126 <= committer: JazzyNico <nicoduf@...32...> 125 <= committer: tavmjong-free <tavmjong@...47...> 71 <= committer: Martin Owens <doctormo@...23...> 56 <= committer: apenner <penner@...84...> 42 <= committer: Kris <Kris.De.Gussem@...93...> 38 <= committer: Markus Engel <markus.engel@...94...> 33 <= committer: Alex Valavanis <valavanisalex@...23...> 32 <= committer: Liam P. White <inkscapebrony@...23...> 30 <= committer: ~suv <suv-sf@...73...> 29 <= committer: Krzysztof Kosiński <tweenk.pl@...23...> 26 <= committer: Sebastian Wüst <sebi@...95...> 17 <= committer: Jon A. Cruz <jon@...9...> 15 <= committer: bryce <bryce@...96...> 14 <= committer: Diederik van Lierop <mail@...97...> 12 <= committer: Josh Andler <scislac@...23...> 11 <= committer: mathog 9 <= committer: Janis Eisaks <jancs@...98...> 7 <= committer: theAdib <theadib@...23...> 5 <= committer: Liam P. White <inkscapebrony at-sign gmail dot com> 5 <= committer: Jabiertxof <jtx@...68...> 4 <= committer: Matthew Petroff <matthew@...85...> 3 <= committer: Kris De Gussem <Kris.De.Gussem@...93...> 3 <= committer: Bryce Harrington <bryce@...24...> 3 <= committer: bryce <bryce@...24...> 2 <= committer: insaner <launchpad@...99...> 1 <= committer: Vinícius dos Santos Oliveira <vini.ipsmaker@...23...> 1 <= committer: UweSchoeler <mail@...100...> 1 <= committer: theadib <theadib@...23...> 1 <= committer: mail@...100... 1 <= committer: Ivan Masár <helix84@...101...> 1 <= committer: ctenar <ctenar@...102...> 1 <= committer: Campbell Barton <ideasman42@...23...> 1 <= committer: buliabyak
For a better sense of scale, see this graph:
https://inkscape.org/en/gallery/item/944/
Martin,
Trying not to go off-topic too much, but... I was thinking about the next "developer education book" campaign, and am starting to believe that trunk statistics are heavily skewed towards devs that don't use branches (i.e. me). So please read the numbers with a grain of salt.
- Johan
On 29-10-2014 21:05, Tavmjong Bah wrote:
On Wed, 2014-10-29 at 15:49 -0400, Martin Owens wrote:
On Wed, 2014-10-29 at 20:00 +0100, Tavmjong Bah wrote:
One thing that has become apparent over the last few years attending LGM and the GSoC mentors meeting is that Inkscape has a much smaller and less active community that other similar Open Source projects. (While not exactly comparing oranges to oranges, Drupal has 30,000 code contributors.)
Here is the number of committers with the number of commits for the last year based on "bzr log -v". Note some people appear on more than one line. This is fewer than Martin's analysis shows.
163 <= committer: Johan B. C. Engelen <j.b.c.engelen@...51...> 126 <= committer: JazzyNico <nicoduf@...32...> 125 <= committer: tavmjong-free <tavmjong@...47...> 71 <= committer: Martin Owens <doctormo@...23...> 56 <= committer: apenner <penner@...84...> 42 <= committer: Kris <Kris.De.Gussem@...93...> 38 <= committer: Markus Engel <markus.engel@...94...> 33 <= committer: Alex Valavanis <valavanisalex@...23...> 32 <= committer: Liam P. White <inkscapebrony@...23...> 30 <= committer: ~suv <suv-sf@...73...> 29 <= committer: Krzysztof Kosiński <tweenk.pl@...23...> 26 <= committer: Sebastian Wüst <sebi@...95...> 17 <= committer: Jon A. Cruz <jon@...9...> 15 <= committer: bryce <bryce@...96...> 14 <= committer: Diederik van Lierop <mail@...97...> 12 <= committer: Josh Andler <scislac@...23...> 11 <= committer: mathog 9 <= committer: Janis Eisaks <jancs@...98...> 7 <= committer: theAdib <theadib@...23...> 5 <= committer: Liam P. White <inkscapebrony at-sign gmail dot com> 5 <= committer: Jabiertxof <jtx@...68...> 4 <= committer: Matthew Petroff <matthew@...85...> 3 <= committer: Kris De Gussem <Kris.De.Gussem@...93...> 3 <= committer: Bryce Harrington <bryce@...24...> 3 <= committer: bryce <bryce@...24...> 2 <= committer: insaner <launchpad@...99...> 1 <= committer: Vinícius dos Santos Oliveira <vini.ipsmaker@...23...> 1 <= committer: UweSchoeler <mail@...100...> 1 <= committer: theadib <theadib@...23...> 1 <= committer: mail@...100... 1 <= committer: Ivan Masár <helix84@...101...> 1 <= committer: ctenar <ctenar@...102...> 1 <= committer: Campbell Barton <ideasman42@...23...> 1 <= committer: buliabyak
For a better sense of scale, see this graph:
https://inkscape.org/en/gallery/item/944/
Martin,
On Wed, 2014-10-29 at 01:10 -0700, Bryce Harrington wrote:
What came up is having regular board meetings.
Why? What is the specific problem(s) that meetings would solve?
I think the the primary reason is cadence. Having a point where items are brought up and discussed because everyone is around and talking about it.
I don't think that the meetings should be mandatory, but I do think that by having them it might make someone reevaluate "I've not made it to the last 3, why not?" Not sure we need to formalize that, the social pressure there I think is enough.
Ted
On Wed, Oct 29, 2014 at 07:41:14PM +0100, Johan Engelen wrote:
Why? What is the specific problem(s) that meetings would solve?
I will come back to this later, but the trigger for this was a discussion on how to resolve board inactivity... we spoke about making a more objective 'rule' that would not require nasty discussions. One proposal was "miss 3 meetings in a row"
Ah, I wondered if that was the case.
So let's not put the cart before the horse. Let's set aside discussion about meetings and focus on this, since it sounds like the real problem here.
I also share this concern. It bugs me when we hold a vote and we get 3 yes votes and silence from the other 4; this has happened more than a few times. Even when we have a majority, it still is annoying to me that we don't ever seem to get to 100% voter turnout. I think about this pretty much every time we vote.
Most of the time the solution is fairly simple - I privately ping whomever has gotten inactive and politely inquire what's up. Sometimes that gets their attention, they get their vote in and are more active, perhaps after getting some real life stuff sorted out. In a couple instances they opted to honorably step down to free the seat for someone else. So far in all but one of the instances, the issue got happily resolved one way or the other. The one instance still outstanding (i.e. MentalGuy) I'm still trying to resolve off-list.
I have to emphasize the "real life stuff" as something we need to be conscientious of. Folks here on the board have shared privately some of the tough stuff they've had to go through: Family crises, employment disruptions, extensive travel, health troubles, intensive work situations, and even plain old burn out working in Inkscape. Probably more, that just isn't shared. But usually whatever the problem is, it's temporary or will settle down and allow participation again after a month or two. For someone going through a rough spot, kicking them off the board would be adding insult to injury. It might end up driving an otherwise great contributor away from the project permanently.
Now, all that said, It's probably for the best that we are adding some objective mechanism to oust board members. Hopefully we never have to use it, and I think we should work very hard to never, ever do so. But, if someone disappears and can't be contacted for months on end, that may be our only option. (As an off topic aside... Long timers will recall such an event was one of the things that led to us starting Inkscape in the first place...)
Rather than meeting attendance, I think voting history would be a better objective mechanism. Say, out of the past N months if you cast votes in fewer than X% of the referendums. Where N is like 3 or 6 months, and X is like 5 or 10. My thinking is that while meeting attendance is really just a means to an end, but voting is the fundamental reason we were elected to these seats.
Bryce
(Wish we could apply rules like this against the US Congress members...)
On Wed, Oct 29, 2014 at 07:41:14PM +0100, Johan Engelen wrote:
I remember Martin's "board-aggravation" email pretty well, and (if perhaps by the wrong method) it made me realize that I, we, the board, should take our responsibilities more seriously (or should step down if I don't want that).
For me, regular meetings could help reach timely responses or decisions. I think it will help underline the responsibilities as a board member, especially now that we start looking into funded development.
Ok, back to the topic of meetings.
I completely agree with you that the "board-aggrevation" emails were a wake-up call that we weren't doing that great of a job. To be fair, up until that point the demands had also been fairly modest, and we were all pretty inexperienced.
To me, the take-away was not a lack of meetings, but a lack of leadership. And that was my fault. I vowed to step it up, and help move us forward on some of the various needs at hand. It's a ton of work we need though, and my freetime is pretty sparse, so it's been a slow slog. But I've been driving ever forward through the list, and haven't any intention of stopping.
With all this said, if folks still think regular (non-mandatory) meetings are worthwhile, I'm open to giving it a go. Either formal ones (with agendas, minutes and action items) or just informal brainstorming/bull sessions. Whichever structure, someone will need to take the duty of sending reminders (else I'll guarantee they won't stay very 'regular'), and you'll need to make sure the discussions are logged and posted publically.
Bryce
I'm just writing to say I've been following the thread but don't feel like I have anything of value to contribute outside of what others have said. Just don't want people to think I'm sleeping at the wheel here. :)
Cheers, Josh
On Thu, Oct 30, 2014 at 3:31 AM, Bryce Harrington <bryce@...2...> wrote:
On Wed, Oct 29, 2014 at 07:41:14PM +0100, Johan Engelen wrote:
I remember Martin's "board-aggravation" email pretty well, and (if perhaps by the wrong method) it made me realize that I, we, the board, should take our responsibilities more seriously (or should step down if I don't want that).
For me, regular meetings could help reach timely responses or decisions. I think it will help underline the responsibilities as a board member, especially now that we start looking into funded development.
Ok, back to the topic of meetings.
I completely agree with you that the "board-aggrevation" emails were a wake-up call that we weren't doing that great of a job. To be fair, up until that point the demands had also been fairly modest, and we were all pretty inexperienced.
To me, the take-away was not a lack of meetings, but a lack of leadership. And that was my fault. I vowed to step it up, and help move us forward on some of the various needs at hand. It's a ton of work we need though, and my freetime is pretty sparse, so it's been a slow slog. But I've been driving ever forward through the list, and haven't any intention of stopping.
With all this said, if folks still think regular (non-mandatory) meetings are worthwhile, I'm open to giving it a go. Either formal ones (with agendas, minutes and action items) or just informal brainstorming/bull sessions. Whichever structure, someone will need to take the duty of sending reminders (else I'll guarantee they won't stay very 'regular'), and you'll need to make sure the discussions are logged and posted publically.
Bryce
Inkscape-board mailing list Inkscape-board@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/inkscape-board
On Wed, Oct 29, 2014 at 10:18:10PM +0100, Johan Engelen wrote:
Trying not to go off-topic too much, but... I was thinking about the next "developer education book" campaign, and am starting to believe that trunk statistics are heavily skewed towards devs that don't use branches (i.e. me). So please read the numbers with a grain of salt.
Should we consider coming up with some alternative ranking mechanisms? If we had a mix of algorithms (# bug fixes, # emails on list, # branches proposed for merges, ...), we could make the algorithm choice done randomly at the end of the year, to dissuade gaming the system.
Bryce
- Johan
On 29-10-2014 21:05, Tavmjong Bah wrote:
On Wed, 2014-10-29 at 15:49 -0400, Martin Owens wrote:
On Wed, 2014-10-29 at 20:00 +0100, Tavmjong Bah wrote:
One thing that has become apparent over the last few years attending LGM and the GSoC mentors meeting is that Inkscape has a much smaller and less active community that other similar Open Source projects. (While not exactly comparing oranges to oranges, Drupal has 30,000 code contributors.)
Here is the number of committers with the number of commits for the last year based on "bzr log -v". Note some people appear on more than one line. This is fewer than Martin's analysis shows.
163 <= committer: Johan B. C. Engelen <j.b.c.engelen@...51...> 126 <= committer: JazzyNico <nicoduf@...32...> 125 <= committer: tavmjong-free <tavmjong@...47...> 71 <= committer: Martin Owens <doctormo@...23...> 56 <= committer: apenner <penner@...84...> 42 <= committer: Kris <Kris.De.Gussem@...93...> 38 <= committer: Markus Engel <markus.engel@...94...> 33 <= committer: Alex Valavanis <valavanisalex@...23...> 32 <= committer: Liam P. White <inkscapebrony@...23...> 30 <= committer: ~suv <suv-sf@...73...> 29 <= committer: Krzysztof Kosiński <tweenk.pl@...23...> 26 <= committer: Sebastian Wüst <sebi@...95...> 17 <= committer: Jon A. Cruz <jon@...9...> 15 <= committer: bryce <bryce@...96...> 14 <= committer: Diederik van Lierop <mail@...97...> 12 <= committer: Josh Andler <scislac@...23...> 11 <= committer: mathog 9 <= committer: Janis Eisaks <jancs@...98...> 7 <= committer: theAdib <theadib@...23...> 5 <= committer: Liam P. White <inkscapebrony at-sign gmail dot com> 5 <= committer: Jabiertxof <jtx@...68...> 4 <= committer: Matthew Petroff <matthew@...85...> 3 <= committer: Kris De Gussem <Kris.De.Gussem@...93...> 3 <= committer: Bryce Harrington <bryce@...24...> 3 <= committer: bryce <bryce@...24...> 2 <= committer: insaner <launchpad@...99...> 1 <= committer: Vinícius dos Santos Oliveira <vini.ipsmaker@...39...3...> 1 <= committer: UweSchoeler <mail@...100...> 1 <= committer: theadib <theadib@...23...> 1 <= committer: mail@...100... 1 <= committer: Ivan Masár <helix84@...101...> 1 <= committer: ctenar <ctenar@...102...> 1 <= committer: Campbell Barton <ideasman42@...23...> 1 <= committer: buliabyak
For a better sense of scale, see this graph:
https://inkscape.org/en/gallery/item/944/
Martin,
Inkscape-board mailing list Inkscape-board@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/inkscape-board
On 3-11-2014 11:52, Bryce Harrington wrote:
On Wed, Oct 29, 2014 at 10:18:10PM +0100, Johan Engelen wrote:
Trying not to go off-topic too much, but... I was thinking about the next "developer education book" campaign, and am starting to believe that trunk statistics are heavily skewed towards devs that don't use branches (i.e. me). So please read the numbers with a grain of salt.
Should we consider coming up with some alternative ranking mechanisms? If we had a mix of algorithms (# bug fixes, # emails on list, # branches proposed for merges, ...), we could make the algorithm choice done randomly at the end of the year, to dissuade gaming the system.
Yeah, perhaps we should. I really don't know what would work though. Since we are so close to release, perhaps # bug fixes/point is good.
How about we make it a Christmas present this time?
- Johan
Hi Bryce, Thanks for splitting the discussion.
We discussed a similar voting-count-system at the GSoC summit, but I think we decided for something stronger (the meetings). But now when I read your mail, I think what you propose is very good, because it tackles exactly the problem we want to fix.
Thanks, Johan
On 30-10-2014 10:00, Bryce Harrington wrote:
On Wed, Oct 29, 2014 at 07:41:14PM +0100, Johan Engelen wrote:
Why? What is the specific problem(s) that meetings would solve?
I will come back to this later, but the trigger for this was a discussion on how to resolve board inactivity... we spoke about making a more objective 'rule' that would not require nasty discussions. One proposal was "miss 3 meetings in a row"
Ah, I wondered if that was the case.
So let's not put the cart before the horse. Let's set aside discussion about meetings and focus on this, since it sounds like the real problem here.
I also share this concern. It bugs me when we hold a vote and we get 3 yes votes and silence from the other 4; this has happened more than a few times. Even when we have a majority, it still is annoying to me that we don't ever seem to get to 100% voter turnout. I think about this pretty much every time we vote.
Most of the time the solution is fairly simple - I privately ping whomever has gotten inactive and politely inquire what's up. Sometimes that gets their attention, they get their vote in and are more active, perhaps after getting some real life stuff sorted out. In a couple instances they opted to honorably step down to free the seat for someone else. So far in all but one of the instances, the issue got happily resolved one way or the other. The one instance still outstanding (i.e. MentalGuy) I'm still trying to resolve off-list.
I have to emphasize the "real life stuff" as something we need to be conscientious of. Folks here on the board have shared privately some of the tough stuff they've had to go through: Family crises, employment disruptions, extensive travel, health troubles, intensive work situations, and even plain old burn out working in Inkscape. Probably more, that just isn't shared. But usually whatever the problem is, it's temporary or will settle down and allow participation again after a month or two. For someone going through a rough spot, kicking them off the board would be adding insult to injury. It might end up driving an otherwise great contributor away from the project permanently.
Now, all that said, It's probably for the best that we are adding some objective mechanism to oust board members. Hopefully we never have to use it, and I think we should work very hard to never, ever do so. But, if someone disappears and can't be contacted for months on end, that may be our only option. (As an off topic aside... Long timers will recall such an event was one of the things that led to us starting Inkscape in the first place...)
Rather than meeting attendance, I think voting history would be a better objective mechanism. Say, out of the past N months if you cast votes in fewer than X% of the referendums. Where N is like 3 or 6 months, and X is like 5 or 10. My thinking is that while meeting attendance is really just a means to an end, but voting is the fundamental reason we were elected to these seats.
Bryce
(Wish we could apply rules like this against the US Congress members...)
Can we start with just informal meetings then, and see how that goes?
I can schedule a Jenkins job that sends an email every first of the month, or every first monday of the month, etc. Whatever you guys think is nice.
Ciao, Johan
On 30-10-2014 11:31, Bryce Harrington wrote:
On Wed, Oct 29, 2014 at 07:41:14PM +0100, Johan Engelen wrote:
I remember Martin's "board-aggravation" email pretty well, and (if perhaps by the wrong method) it made me realize that I, we, the board, should take our responsibilities more seriously (or should step down if I don't want that).
For me, regular meetings could help reach timely responses or decisions. I think it will help underline the responsibilities as a board member, especially now that we start looking into funded development.
Ok, back to the topic of meetings.
I completely agree with you that the "board-aggrevation" emails were a wake-up call that we weren't doing that great of a job. To be fair, up until that point the demands had also been fairly modest, and we were all pretty inexperienced.
To me, the take-away was not a lack of meetings, but a lack of leadership. And that was my fault. I vowed to step it up, and help move us forward on some of the various needs at hand. It's a ton of work we need though, and my freetime is pretty sparse, so it's been a slow slog. But I've been driving ever forward through the list, and haven't any intention of stopping.
With all this said, if folks still think regular (non-mandatory) meetings are worthwhile, I'm open to giving it a go. Either formal ones (with agendas, minutes and action items) or just informal brainstorming/bull sessions. Whichever structure, someone will need to take the duty of sending reminders (else I'll guarantee they won't stay very 'regular'), and you'll need to make sure the discussions are logged and posted publically.
Bryce
On Sat, Nov 08, 2014 at 07:00:18PM +0100, Johan Engelen wrote:
Can we start with just informal meetings then, and see how that goes?
I can schedule a Jenkins job that sends an email every first of the month, or every first monday of the month, etc. Whatever you guys think is nice.
First Monday would probably be easier for folks to include in their schedules. Thanks for coordinating the meetings.
Ciao, Johan
On 30-10-2014 11:31, Bryce Harrington wrote:
On Wed, Oct 29, 2014 at 07:41:14PM +0100, Johan Engelen wrote:
I remember Martin's "board-aggravation" email pretty well, and (if perhaps by the wrong method) it made me realize that I, we, the board, should take our responsibilities more seriously (or should step down if I don't want that).
For me, regular meetings could help reach timely responses or decisions. I think it will help underline the responsibilities as a board member, especially now that we start looking into funded development.
Ok, back to the topic of meetings.
I completely agree with you that the "board-aggrevation" emails were a wake-up call that we weren't doing that great of a job. To be fair, up until that point the demands had also been fairly modest, and we were all pretty inexperienced.
To me, the take-away was not a lack of meetings, but a lack of leadership. And that was my fault. I vowed to step it up, and help move us forward on some of the various needs at hand. It's a ton of work we need though, and my freetime is pretty sparse, so it's been a slow slog. But I've been driving ever forward through the list, and haven't any intention of stopping.
With all this said, if folks still think regular (non-mandatory) meetings are worthwhile, I'm open to giving it a go. Either formal ones (with agendas, minutes and action items) or just informal brainstorming/bull sessions. Whichever structure, someone will need to take the duty of sending reminders (else I'll guarantee they won't stay very 'regular'), and you'll need to make sure the discussions are logged and posted publically.
Bryce
On Sat, Nov 08, 2014 at 06:59:21PM +0100, Johan Engelen wrote:
Hi Bryce, Thanks for splitting the discussion.
We discussed a similar voting-count-system at the GSoC summit, but I think we decided for something stronger (the meetings). But now when I read your mail, I think what you propose is very good, because it tackles exactly the problem we want to fix.
Did the new FSA get finalized? If not, can you ask them to include a provision to achieve this? If it did, then perhaps we should vote on it.
Bryce
Thanks, Johan
On 30-10-2014 10:00, Bryce Harrington wrote:
On Wed, Oct 29, 2014 at 07:41:14PM +0100, Johan Engelen wrote:
Why? What is the specific problem(s) that meetings would solve?
I will come back to this later, but the trigger for this was a discussion on how to resolve board inactivity... we spoke about making a more objective 'rule' that would not require nasty discussions. One proposal was "miss 3 meetings in a row"
Ah, I wondered if that was the case.
So let's not put the cart before the horse. Let's set aside discussion about meetings and focus on this, since it sounds like the real problem here.
I also share this concern. It bugs me when we hold a vote and we get 3 yes votes and silence from the other 4; this has happened more than a few times. Even when we have a majority, it still is annoying to me that we don't ever seem to get to 100% voter turnout. I think about this pretty much every time we vote.
Most of the time the solution is fairly simple - I privately ping whomever has gotten inactive and politely inquire what's up. Sometimes that gets their attention, they get their vote in and are more active, perhaps after getting some real life stuff sorted out. In a couple instances they opted to honorably step down to free the seat for someone else. So far in all but one of the instances, the issue got happily resolved one way or the other. The one instance still outstanding (i.e. MentalGuy) I'm still trying to resolve off-list.
I have to emphasize the "real life stuff" as something we need to be conscientious of. Folks here on the board have shared privately some of the tough stuff they've had to go through: Family crises, employment disruptions, extensive travel, health troubles, intensive work situations, and even plain old burn out working in Inkscape. Probably more, that just isn't shared. But usually whatever the problem is, it's temporary or will settle down and allow participation again after a month or two. For someone going through a rough spot, kicking them off the board would be adding insult to injury. It might end up driving an otherwise great contributor away from the project permanently.
Now, all that said, It's probably for the best that we are adding some objective mechanism to oust board members. Hopefully we never have to use it, and I think we should work very hard to never, ever do so. But, if someone disappears and can't be contacted for months on end, that may be our only option. (As an off topic aside... Long timers will recall such an event was one of the things that led to us starting Inkscape in the first place...)
Rather than meeting attendance, I think voting history would be a better objective mechanism. Say, out of the past N months if you cast votes in fewer than X% of the referendums. Where N is like 3 or 6 months, and X is like 5 or 10. My thinking is that while meeting attendance is really just a means to an end, but voting is the fundamental reason we were elected to these seats.
Bryce
(Wish we could apply rules like this against the US Congress members...)
On Sat, Nov 08, 2014 at 06:55:53PM +0100, Johan Engelen wrote:
On 3-11-2014 11:52, Bryce Harrington wrote:
On Wed, Oct 29, 2014 at 10:18:10PM +0100, Johan Engelen wrote:
Trying not to go off-topic too much, but... I was thinking about the next "developer education book" campaign, and am starting to believe that trunk statistics are heavily skewed towards devs that don't use branches (i.e. me). So please read the numbers with a grain of salt.
Should we consider coming up with some alternative ranking mechanisms? If we had a mix of algorithms (# bug fixes, # emails on list, # branches proposed for merges, ...), we could make the algorithm choice done randomly at the end of the year, to dissuade gaming the system.
Yeah, perhaps we should. I really don't know what would work though. Since we are so close to release, perhaps # bug fixes/point is good.
How about we make it a Christmas present this time?
Sounds good, why don't you draft up something we can vote on? You can probably use our last one as a template:
https://code.launchpad.net/~inkscape.board/+junk/board-docs
Add your new one to the proposals/ dir and let me know when it's good to go and I'll do a call for votes.
Bryce
On Sat, 2014-11-08 at 21:56 -0800, Bryce Harrington wrote:
On Sat, Nov 08, 2014 at 06:59:21PM +0100, Johan Engelen wrote:
Hi Bryce, Thanks for splitting the discussion.
We discussed a similar voting-count-system at the GSoC summit, but I think we decided for something stronger (the meetings). But now when I read your mail, I think what you propose is very good, because it tackles exactly the problem we want to fix.
Did the new FSA get finalized? If not, can you ask them to include a provision to achieve this? If it did, then perhaps we should vote on it.
No, the FSA did not get finalized. We need to get back to them on the vote-counting system.
Rather than meeting attendance, I think voting history would be a better objective mechanism. Say, out of the past N months if you cast votes in fewer than X% of the referendums. Where N is like 3 or 6 months, and X is like 5 or 10. My thinking is that while meeting attendance is really just a means to an end, but voting is the fundamental reason we were elected to these seats.
Fine with me.
In 2014 we have voted on:
13 Jan: Developer Education (Tav, Ted, and MentalGuy did not vote.) 19 Feb: Tav attending LGM and Leipzig SVG WG meetings. (Tav recused, MentalGuy did not vote.) 19 Feb: Developer attendance at LGM (Tav and MentalGuy did not vote.) 23 Feb: Join OIN Network (Ted and MentalGuy did not vote.) 24 Feb: Moving email list to Launchpad (Bryce, Tav, MentalGuy did not vote) 05 May: Fund raising (MentalGuy did not vote.) 15 Jun: GSoC Mentor's meeting (Jon and MentalGuy did not vote.) 26 Jul: Tav attending Santa Clara SVG WG meeting (Tav recused, Bryce and MentalGuy did not vote.). 26 Jul: Tav attending London SVG WG meeting and The Graphical Web Conf. (Tav recused, Bryce and MentalGuy did not vote.) 14 Aug: Trademark (MentalGuy did not vote.) 11 Oct: Pre-approving projects (MentalGuy did not vote.)
We had eleven votes
Missing votes: MentalGuy: 11, Bryce: 3, Ted: 2, Tav: 2, Jon: 1.
I know the votes I missed were either conflict of interest (Developer Education) or the decision had already been made (Moving email to LaunchPad). In retrospect, I think that even if there are enough votes to decide a referendum, board members who haven't voted should for the public record still cast their vote or explicitly note the conflict of interest.
Given this data, I propose:
If a person misses three or more votes in a row where multiple votes within one calendar month are counted as one vote, their board position is vacated.
(The "multiple votes within one calendar month are counted as one vote" is to avoid a situation where a board member are removed if they are on vacation for a couple of weeks during which multiple votes take place.)
Tav
On Mon, Nov 10, 2014 at 05:51:43PM +0100, Tavmjong Bah wrote:
On Sat, 2014-11-08 at 21:56 -0800, Bryce Harrington wrote:
On Sat, Nov 08, 2014 at 06:59:21PM +0100, Johan Engelen wrote:
Hi Bryce, Thanks for splitting the discussion.
We discussed a similar voting-count-system at the GSoC summit, but I think we decided for something stronger (the meetings). But now when I read your mail, I think what you propose is very good, because it tackles exactly the problem we want to fix.
Did the new FSA get finalized? If not, can you ask them to include a provision to achieve this? If it did, then perhaps we should vote on it.
No, the FSA did not get finalized. We need to get back to them on the vote-counting system.
Rather than meeting attendance, I think voting history would be a better objective mechanism. Say, out of the past N months if you cast votes in fewer than X% of the referendums. Where N is like 3 or 6 months, and X is like 5 or 10. My thinking is that while meeting attendance is really just a means to an end, but voting is the fundamental reason we were elected to these seats.
Fine with me.
In 2014 we have voted on:
13 Jan: Developer Education (Tav, Ted, and MentalGuy did not vote.) 19 Feb: Tav attending LGM and Leipzig SVG WG meetings. (Tav recused, MentalGuy did not vote.) 19 Feb: Developer attendance at LGM (Tav and MentalGuy did not vote.) 23 Feb: Join OIN Network (Ted and MentalGuy did not vote.) 24 Feb: Moving email list to Launchpad (Bryce, Tav, MentalGuy did not vote) 05 May: Fund raising (MentalGuy did not vote.) 15 Jun: GSoC Mentor's meeting (Jon and MentalGuy did not vote.) 26 Jul: Tav attending Santa Clara SVG WG meeting (Tav recused, Bryce and MentalGuy did not vote.). 26 Jul: Tav attending London SVG WG meeting and The Graphical Web Conf. (Tav recused, Bryce and MentalGuy did not vote.) 14 Aug: Trademark (MentalGuy did not vote.) 11 Oct: Pre-approving projects (MentalGuy did not vote.)
We had eleven votes
Missing votes: MentalGuy: 11, Bryce: 3, Ted: 2, Tav: 2, Jon: 1.
I know the votes I missed were either conflict of interest (Developer Education)
Good point. For purposes of activity, recuse should count as voted.
or the decision had already been made (Moving email to LaunchPad).
For that particular vote my gut said we needed consensus. Even though we had a majority approval, I've not moved forward on it because I think we should all be in agreement on the plan first. The sense I get is that moving the list is ok, but maybe we can find something better than launchpad to move to.
In retrospect, I think that even if there are enough votes to decide a referendum, board members who haven't voted should for the public record still cast their vote or explicitly note the conflict of interest.
Agreed, that sounds like a good approach.
Given this data, I propose:
If a person misses three or more votes in a row where multiple votes within one calendar month are counted as one vote, their board position is vacated.
(The "multiple votes within one calendar month are counted as one vote" is to avoid a situation where a board member are removed if they are on vacation for a couple of weeks during which multiple votes take place.)
Sounds good. The less frequent our votes are, the more important to participate in some of them. Where we're having tons of votes we don't expect you to vote so religiously.
It would be nice to have a simpler statement that's easier to remember (like, "Vote at least once every 3 months"), but as a rule it seems fair and relatively easy to verify.
Bryce
participants (7)
-
Bryce Harrington -
Johan Engelen -
Jon A. Cruz -
Josh Andler -
Martin Owens -
Tavmjong Bah -
Ted Gould