I think if we need to find reasons to keep a meeting relevant, we need
to kill the meeting. Lawrence, you should just discontinue the meeting
for a few weeks and see if we really need it. I bet we wont.
I would much rather see us spend the time to curate what's important --
what platform people should/must read. Someone started a Reddit
subgroup r/MozillaTech. This subgroup is much more relevant to the work
that my team is doing than the public Platform Meeting.
So, let's focus on getting technical information to the platform team
using something like r/MozillaTech. We can ask the smaller, more
focused, staff meetings to report on r/MozillaTech (or similar) any
interesting news.
(btw, mbrubeck... thank you so much for making the MoCo meeting
accessible to the dozens of people that read it instead of watch/listen
to it. I am pretty sure you've saved hundreds of engineering hours.)
Justin Lebar wrote:
One thing I love about the MoCo meetings is that if I don't go, I
don't miss anything except the chance to ask questions: mbrubeck&co
create detailed minutes (really, transcripts) of every meeting, which
I can read on my schedule. He then e-mails the transcript out to
everyone, so I don't even have to remember to go looking for it.
Since in-person attendance at the MoCo meetings is non-zero, it seems
clear that some people prefer being in live attendance. That's
totally fine. But at the very least, I think it's useful to recognize
that not everyone is willing or able to attend the meetings live, and
if we think what's going on there is important, we should make an
effort to broadcast it to a larger audience.
Last time I checked the wiki isn't a canonical record of the
engineering meeting's contents, and last time I checked there's no way
to get notified when a meeting's notes are up (via RSS or e-mail or
whatever).
On a related note, I think the engineering meeting is a bad place for
having discussions or debating decisions. Inevitably, many of the
people in attendance won't care about this particular issue, so we're
just wasting their time. And similarly, at our current numeric and
geographic scale it's inevitable that people who do care about the
issue won't be in attendance at the meeting and thus won't be able to
participate. I think therefore that discussions / debates are
better-suited for our newsgroups or for smaller meetings.
-Justin
On Wed, Apr 24, 2013 at 2:26 PM, Lawrence Mandel<lman...@mozilla.com> wrote:
tl;dr
I would like to make the platform meeting more relevant for engineers. I have
already made some changes (see below) and am interested in your feedback on
what you would like to get out of this meeting. If you don't currently attend,
what would make this meeting relevant for you?
---
Since taking over management of the Platform meeting in February, my goal has
been to make it more engineer driven and more relevant to the day-to-day
activities of engineers. I think that there is value in having a forum for
Mozilla's engineers to speak with one another on a regular basis. However, with
the size of Mozilla's engineering base, creating a useful forum is a challenge.
Some of the changes that we've made are:
- Engineers are once again doing the talking - Many of the technical updates
were being given by project managers. No more. Updates for engineers, by
engineers. So far, I think this has been successful in changing the tone of the
meeting.
- More talk about work in progress - Reporting about completed work is great.
However, we are now also talking about active projects. I think work that
touches common sections of the code base or work that is likely to impact other
teams is especially useful to flag.
- Identify topics that are stalled / need more attention - Over the last month
I have seen a new focus on stability and orange factor issues. I have also seen
a number of calls for help in identifying the source of issues.
- Invite other teams to speak with engineering - I invited Sheppy to join us to
discuss documentation. I would encourage the invitation of other teams with
which we collaborate to join the meeting for specific topics.
- Flag important discussions from across Mozilla's mailing lists - A number of
people have commented to me that there are too many lists to track. This
meeting is an opportunity to surface key online discussions to ensure they have
the participation of the right people and reach a conclusion.
Some other suggestions are:
- A review of best practices and anti-pattens in order to build the technical
vitality of the Mozilla engineering organization.
- More involvement by more people. The product and project sections of the agenda do not have a
specific owner. You can bring up any related work wherever you think it makes sense. There are also
the catchall sections "Key Issues" and "Roundtable" if you are not sure where
your update belongs.
I want this meeting to be relevant for you. However, I am just a steward for
this meeting. I need your help. Why do you attend the platform meeting? If you
previously attended the meeting, why did you stop? Do you have ideas to make
the Platform meeting more useful?
Thanks,
Lawrence
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