On Tue, 6 Jul 2010 11:21:40 +0200, Holger Levsen <holger@layer-acht.org> wrote:
> On Dienstag, 6. Juli 2010, Christian PERRIER wrote:
> > Given the current budget considerations and after reading Zack's mail
> > which well summarizes my own views on how seriously the money flow
> > should be taken, I would suggest *not* sponsoring the daytrip at all.
> > And certainly not the baseball game, except maybe for people for
> > really can't afford it.
>
> be aware, people might yell at you for saying so.
I believe that there has been a misunderstanding about this "yelling". I
think that can be clarified with some calm and reasoned processing about
what happened. With that said, I believe that your comment above is not
helpful or productive for untangling this understanding.
I did not perceive the "yelling" that you are referring to as you are
characterizing it. Rather I think the confusion and noise in the meeting
resulted in people not understanding or missing things that people
said. What I saw happen was Hydroxide made a proposal for one way to
handle the day trip, Clint disagreed with that. MrBeige then suggested
that it seemed like everyone agreed not to spend any Debconf money on
the daytrip. A few people agreed with that, but not everyone, yet it was
taken as if everyone had agreed and no time was given before #agreed was
announced and a number of us were left baffled about what was just
agreed, when there was not a clear proposal. That resulted in many
responses from people saying that we did not agree to that, and the
'yelling' that you are referring to ("THAT IS NOT AGREED").
It was not yelling about *not* sponsoring the day trip, it was yelling
because the meeting process had been given enough space to hear if
people actually did agree or not. It was said that something was agreed
before people had agreed. Things were going way too fast at that point.
> frankly speaking, I'm utterly disgusted by yesterdays meeting. spending 70% of
> the time of the meeting discussing tshirts, yelling about debconf having to
> sponsor a baseball game, while still letting people in the B queue hanging
> regarding their sponsorship. funding the baseball game and or the subway
> tickets for the day trip will cause one eager person working on debian to
> stay at home. well done.
First of all, the number of people attending yesterdays meeting was
surprising, especially compared to previous meetings. There were way too
many people talking at the same time, often on multiple different
threads. People did not respect the agenda, or the facilitator, who was
trying desperately to keep things in line. I feel badly for poor DrDub
who was driven insane trying to get us sane. I felt many times that we
were just following random people's train of thought, rather than the
agenda. For example we were 'officially' on the agenda sub-topic of
"Corporate Sponsors" in the "Budget Overview" topic, but people were
veering off into what seemed to be a 'Slash the Budget" topic, killing
the formal dinner. In the middle of trying to make a decision about that
we are getting hit by details and a proposal about funding the daytrip
while at the same time the budget.ods is being updated about t-shirt
numbers and new totals are being discussed. It was a mess, and all over
the place.
There were some complicated issues on the table, with many of the people
participating not having been part of previous meetings where some
things had been discussed or decided. We don't have a lot of time left,
and these are big issues, so a meeting like this is going to be difficult.
> also i dont get, why neither zacks mail was discussed on the list nor in the
> meeting. instead now the idea is to ask for 6.5k instead of the offered 20k.
> why? WHY?
Now I feel like you are yelling, why?
There are perfectly reasonable explanations for what you are
asking. When I arrived at Columbia for the local team meeting that
happened 1hr before the global team meeting, I was not aware of Zack's
email, nor was 90% of the other people who also arrived for that
meeting. That email was sent very close to the meeting, and most of us
were traveling to the meeting location and did not read it until we had
arrived.
> also, why let queue B wait even longer?
>
> i also think its stupid to shrink the opening hours of the venue to save a few
> hundred bucks. ask for 7k from debian (or whatever is needed) and we'll have
> a much more relaxed conference.
We need to work on cutting the budget, and I do think that saving even
$275 (which is how much would be saved by shrinking the opening hours)
is worth the effort, but I dont think that the entire meeting should
have had a secret sub-agenda of budget cutting that went through all the
agenda items. This made it so that small amounts like this took up much
of our time in the meeting. Time would have been better spent if we had
an agenda item about budget cutting and we focused on that
independently, and perhaps some people were tasked with working on
finding ways to cut the budget outside of the meeting.
H0lger, I think you are right in identifying that the meeting was
unruly, hopefully you pointing this out will help in the upcoming
meetings. I think everyone is working hard to make this happen and we
are all feeling the time pressure, but we need to make sure that we
aren't cutting process and listening to people because we have little
time left!
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