Re: New take on meeting schedule: recurring drop-in
On 10/08/25 16:46, Blair Noctis wrote:
You could argue that the lack of such explicit waiver does create an
implicit feeling of obligation to attend, so it helps to have a fruitful
meeting. On that point, you are right.
Yes, that was my point.> From another perspective, maybe there are 2
people not showing up
exactly because the plenary time isn't right for them? If we are already
unable to fix a meeting with more than 3, what's the difference with one
with 2?
A meeting with two people is not a meeting, it's just two people having
a conversation, which we always do in Rust Team :-) If the time is not
right for them, we should change it to make it possible for them to attend.
The timing is one reason. But ultimately, we are a loose team, without
structural or practical pressure to have a recurring meeting. Is it
really necessary? From my experience we were just exchanging news, not
having extensive discussions or even debates. We can't decide matters
entirely through the meeting.
I don't entirely agree with this, but if there's a consensus then we
should stop having meetings. I don't think that substituting actual
meetings with random date-setting to which no-one is supposed to
participate just to keep the illusion that we are having meetings is
fruitful in any way.
The thing is, there is no power invested in the meeting. It's not
decisive on any matter. Coordination and collaboration happen not
because of the meeting, but out of individual team member's will. As
such, it can only be informational, thus, optional. From this
perspective, it doesn't matter if we say it out loud it's optional or
not. It inherently is. Its discussions are not inherently more serious/
formal than "ordinary activity" on IRC or ML. Even a (hypothetical) book
editor meeting would have been decisive and imposed more "obligation" on
the editors because they have direct "power" over the book and expected
obligation to improve it. People feel it, that's the reason they have
been attending at will.
The other thing is, it's a bit unlikely we invest power in it. I know
people who won't. Do-ocracy isn't as good as it first seems.
Maybe it's necessary from a social perspective. I don't know.
Many times on IRC someone comes up with an idea and we understand it
should not be discussed by two or three people casually, but with the
whole team in a dedicated session, as it would affect every one of us.
Some recent examples: setting up backports/updates, setting up a shared
namespace for applications, forming an editorial group for the book,
agreeing upon a patch policy (which we have not done yet), f_g's
recurring updates on how he intends to manage the toolchain in the near
future. That's what team meetings are for. It's not about power or being
decisive (I agree with you decisiveness does not apply to us as in the
end everybody does what they want, as it should be in a volunteer
project), it's about sharing decisions and objectives that affect all,
which requires participation.
Of course, the issue is we sometimes see scarce participation, which can
make these meetings next to useless. I don't think intentionally aiming
for less participation is the solution here. I think *increasing*
participation is. That is: *if* we deem it necessary. It may be that
there are periods when we just don't feel the need to have a meeting
because there's just not that much to talk about. If that's the case
then we should avoid having a meeting that month at all. For instance,
what are we going to talk about this week? Nobody added anything to [1].
Does it make sense to organize fixed-scheduled biweekly meetings where
half the team is supposed to participate (well, not really, because
participation would be expected no more), if there are periods of time
when this is clearly useless?
My counter-proposal is: let's start from the topics. Let's have a shared
space ([1] is perfectly fine) where we can collect topics for team
meetings until there is a sufficient number of them that we can have a
fruitful meeting with people actually interested in participating in it.
It doesn't matter if we do one meeting per month or one every three
months. What matters is that they're fruitful, which implies
participation, which requires interest. It's fine not to have meetings
for a long time if there's nothing to discuss. We're not that kind of
team, as you noted. Then we set the dates. Formally choosing a date from
time to time instead of setting fixed dates helps us count how many of
us there are and to avoid days were people -- especially those really
interested in participating -- cannot attend. It *increases*
participation. If we don't reach a minimum number of votes on the dates,
we assume there's not enough interest (or people simply cannot attend
for their own reasons) and the meeting is postponed.
We are a very active team, we talk to each other literally on a daily
basis. We don't need teem meetings to keep in touch. We need them to
share thinking and decisions that affect us all. Less meetings with more
participation is much more useful than more meetings with 2 attendees.
--
,Sdrager
Blair Noctis
🇵🇸
[1] https://pad.riseup.net/p/DebianRustTeamMeetAgenda-keep
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