Jérémy Bobbio wrote:
Hello,
As this is my first mail to the Debian-Women, here is a collection of
short statements about me : Debian user, wanting to contribute ; male,
aware of gender issues, not feeling well in most geeks circles due to
sexism, competition and other common behaviours ; still not really
knowing where to fit in the D-W project. [1]
Hello Jérémy, and welcome :)
After some private talks on IRC, I would like to share some feelings
about previous D-W meetings to the list.
First, the flow rate was really too high, with a lot of different
ideas being discussed at the same time. It's IRC and not real life
discussions, so there is no such thing as interrupting someone [2],
but I think it would be a lot better if we could focus on only one
speaker at a time. That would help non native english speakers to
follow and to have more time to write their own ideas.
OK, I think that point 5 from that link ypu posted
(http://docs.indymedia.org/view/Global/ImcIRC), is a good idea. Namely
to have the moderator change the topic of the channel to reflect the
current question or sub-topic of the meeting. Hopefully that would help
the non-English speakers to follow things too.
Point 6 from the link (having a mechanism whereby people raise their
hands to take it in turns to speak) is an interesting idea. I am not
sure whether I think it would work well for our meetings or not, bearing
in mind how long it took us to do a similar thing in the first meeting
(ie go around in order for people to introduce themselves).
I think the "raise your hand" idea might be worth a try, to see how it
works. Basically I think there might be some advantages, like getting a
discussion that is easier to follow, and some disadvantages, like losing
the "conversation" aspect of the meetings we've had so far.
Has anyone tried this in an IRC meeting of similar size and how did it
work?
Second, in order to keep the discussion moving forward, it would be
great to make a more detailed agenda of the meeting. Its elaboration
could be a collective process using the wiki. The facilitator would
then keep atendees in focus and move forward between points as time goes.
OK, I am not sure that this one is possible, given the way our meetings
have worked so far. We did have a clear topic and a list of potential
areas within it to discuss, in both previous meetings. These were
announced before the meetings, to the mailing list and they were posted
to the DW website. That much was good, I think.
However, to go futher than that and lay out very specific things to
discuss is harder. It could imply that someone has to decide, before
the meeting, what ideas are actually going to come up and be worth
discussing. This might not work well in a meeting that is partly a
brainstorming of ideas about to approach something.
Does anyone else have an opinion about this?
Helen.