On 31/03/2014 Jürgen Schmidt wrote:
@andrea, my point is that I am not interested in an informal meeting
without a special outcome. Issues of broader interest get attention if
they are communicated on the list and we have no timezone issues.
I probably mixed the problem with a proposed solution that is not the
optimal one. I'm not so interested in the form of this meeting, IRC or
video or anything. And it doesn't have to be focused on the pre-release
activities.
My concern is that currently:
1) It's hard for volunteers to know if their needs are being addressed
or not and how the "big picture" looks like in their areas of interest.
For example, I would be able to report on the Localization activities: I
know what the community priorities are in that respect, what is being
neglected, what should be improved. I don't have the same clarity of
vision in QA for example: I would love that someone who is more active
in QA tells us things like "a lot of new bugs are reported for Impress"
or "we have many duplicate bug reports that are Linux-specific" (both
invented). This would help the project to have clearer priorities. The
"Here's an important bug that we need developers to comment on" is only
part of this.
2) Conversely, it's hard for developers to delegate some tasks. Example
(just an example, don't comment on this): I am active in Localization
but it's still unclear to most people how we import the old translations
into Pootle; we shouldn't expect that a volunteer explicitly asks if he
can help with that; if we knew what the needed skills are, we could
involve more people and take some workload off the "main" developers,
Juergen in this case. Probably this is true of many other cases, it just
needs better communication.
So, my new iteration of the issue is: how can we force this
communication to happen in an effective way? Many open source projects,
even with a completely different structure than OpenOffice, have a
periodic IRC meeting where community-selected items are discussed. Could
we try something like that, still keeping in mind that decisions are
taken on lists and that this would be a communication/awareness improvement?
Regards,
Andrea.
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