On Sun, 2011-07-31 at 10:46 +0200, Florian Effenberger wrote: > Hello, Hola,
> > I'm sitting in Hof on the LibreOffice German Community weekend at the > moment, and yesterday, we had a discussion about the sense and nonsense > of conference calls. > > While it's no secret that I'm in favor of having regular calls, others > here heavily objected. They named language barriers and time zone > problems as stopper for people to join, and felt that those who cannot > join the phone conferences would be somehow excluded from decision making. A very understandable concern. > > My experience is that it sometimes can be really helpful to discuss with > people on the phone and just "get work done". I can understand that > decision making, should it be necessary, should be done on the mailing > list rather than on a phone call, and that minutes and recordings should > be provided afterwards -- however, I do not want to totally omit these > calls. Agreed and that sounds like exactly what has been said before. > > However, as the participation rate in the latest calls has been rather > low, and the participation in the latest poll > (http://www.doodle.com/pdsx39rueycptpeu) is also not that overwhelming, > I'd like to get some feedback from your side on what you think. > > Do the calls make sense? Continuing as they have been, no not really IMO. > Shall we have them regularly? Regular voice contact is worth the effort, IMO. > Shall we do something different? IMO - We need to give good reason for people to take the time to interact - which means, I think, making it so something(s) of substance comes from the time spent. Doing that is more then just picking a certain timezone, of course. One small idea and one amongst the steps that would be reasonably attained would be, a monthly correspondence (let's call it a newsletter, and think about some email/blog hybrid delivery, perhaps) and then schedule this monthly publication to trail the meeting by a few days. One of the functions of the meeting then is to allow anyone in the community a well defined way to get community news, which may be very local, in front of the broader community. I think the above idea works best in the fixed meeting schedule scheme and that it would be important to stress the use of IRC in conjunction with the voice call - this can be one help, I would think, for language barriers. Anyway, it's one idea. So - going on with this here, in this email, isn't the best approach - I will follow up with the idea, with some more specificity, on the wiki, and point to it in a reply to this thread. Thanks, //drew -- Unsubscribe instructions: E-mail to [email protected] Problems? http://www.libreoffice.org/get-help/mailing-lists/how-to-unsubscribe/ Posting guidelines + more: http://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Netiquette List archive: http://listarchives.libreoffice.org/global/marketing/ All messages sent to this list will be publicly archived and cannot be deleted
