Proposal: start using more text-based meetings for the bi-weekly ROCm discussions

[Tim Flink <tflink@tirfa.com>]

I wanted to start a conversation around how the bi-weekly ROCm discussions are being run and propose that we consider more text-based meetings.

Don't get me wrong, there are tangible benefits to having meetings over audio/video:

 - Harder to have misunderstandings on tone which are endemic to text based communication
 - Higher bandwidth communication
 - Easier to have visual aids during discussion


At the same time, text based meetings (via IRC or Matrix) also have some benefits:

 - Can't have audio problems
 - Lower network requirements
 - Taking/creating minutes is much easier
 - low/zero effort meeting logs if someone wants to catch up later

Personally, I'm a fan of text-based minutes just to make minutes and meeting logs less of a pain - most people find taking meeting notes a bit painful in my experience. Text-based meetings do work best when the group has the discipline to limit themselves to one topic at a time but I've never seen that be a major issue so long as someone is doing a decent job at running the meeting.

It looks like Debian's meetbot [1] is still running which is a variant of the tool that I'm used to for text meeting minutes and logs but there may be other options.

[1] https://wiki.debian.org/MeetBot

For a bit of background, I do run Fedora's bi-weekly AI/ML SIG meetings and when we started those, we had a discussion around whether to do video meetings or text-based meetings. Our conclusion was to run text-based meetings as a default but allow for scheduling a video meeting if there were topics which could benefit from the higher communication bandwidth or visual presentation medium.

I'm proposing that we take a similar approach for the ROCm discussions that we currently have every other week - default to text-based meetings unless there is a topic which would benefit from a video-based meeting.

Any thoughts on this proposal?

Tim