Would that be 11am EDT as usual?
I would like to discuss the form of the meeting. In particular, I think the current format is not very helpful for an open community, as (in practice) the agenda is rarely known in advance and minutes are rarely available afterwards. At the same time, it seems that important topics/decisions are at least ocassionaly discussed, excluding involvement of the broader community. Additionally, from the ocasions I attended, the meetings seemed a bit inefficient.
I believe a big increase in both openness and efficiency of the meeting can be achieved, my proposal is roughly:
- Instead of doing a verbal round-robin of who-did-what recently, people write a short summary of their recent progress in replies to the topic before the meeting.
- Alternatively, if we don’t trust people to actually do that before the meeting, the first X minutes of the meeting could be reserved for writing the progress notes and reading the progress notes of others.
- Putting the status in writing is definitely more time consuming than just describing it verbally, but reading is faster than listening, so I would expect this to result in a net time saving + providing written record of what is happening, so other members of the community can follow the developments.
- Putting status reports in writing is IMHO likely to increase the quality of the status reports as people are pushed a bit more to actually formulate the status report in a coherent manner.
- The actual meeting is then reserved for discussing questions and clarifications and for general socializing, seeing everybody, …
- This discussions should also produce some form of written record. Either a designated person writes all the minutes (which should not be too much work as the vast majority of the discussion in the current format are the status updates that got written-down in a distributed manner), alternatively we can ask the person queried to write the main points down, distributing the task. I find the centralized approach a bit more likely to work well, but it is not a strong opinion.
- Important aspect of writing down some notes of the discussions is to reduce the incidence of discussing the same things and rediscovering the same conclusions multiple times.
It is obviously possible I am misunderstanding some goals of the meeting or missing some important details. I’d be happy to hear your feedback on the proposal - either written here or spoken at the meeting.