Re: Questions for the DPL candidates

[Bdale Garbee <bdale@gag.com>]

mgarrett@chiark.greenend.org.uk (Matthew Garrett) writes:

> How about the creation of a checklist for meeting organisation and
> reporting? Something along the lines of:
>
> 1) Has the meeting been announced well in advance?
> 2) Have we defined the scope of the meeting?
> 3) Have we given others an opportunity to provide input on the issues we
> hope to discuss?
> 4) Have we recorded the process that led to our conclusions?
> 5) Does our write-up start with the problems we wish to address and
> then logically progress from there to the conclusions we reached?
>
> would result in less ill-will in future.

I think the biggest problem with the sequence of events around the Vancouver
meeting is addressed by number 5 in your list.  Writing stuff like this up is
hard, particularly if those involved in writing it and reviewing it already
have a lot of context in mind, but it's worth working hard to get this right.

Points 1 through 3 are reasonable for some kinds of meetings, and utterly
unreasonable for others.  There's clearly a continuum here, from two people
having a coffee or beer together to debconf.

Point 4 is tough for two reasons.  First, it's often not apparent at the time
that a discussion is leading to a conclusion that others might expect to be 
well documented later.  Second, one of the main points of having in-person
meetings is to allow people to interact with each other on a personal level.
This doesn't really work when there are audio and video recorders running 
capturing every hastily-spoken word and scowl for all eternity... and the
middle ground of trying to keep rough notes along the way isn't always easy.

I'd like to gently point out that most of the really innovative ideas for 
evolving Debian that I recall over the years didn't come from highly structured
meetings.  They came from individuals or little groups of friends with a 
common set of interests who puzzled through something, had an interesting 
revelation, and set about working on it.  

Let's be careful what we wish for.

Bdale