Re: On cooperative work [Was: Re: newbus' ivar's limitation..]

On 08/02/2012 05:54, David Chisnall wrote:
> On 2 Aug 2012, at 05:30, Doug Barton wrote:
> 
>> I used to ask the PTB to provide *some* form of remote
>> participation for even a fraction of the events at the dev summit.
>> I don't bother asking anymore because year after year my requests
>> were met with any of: indifference, hostility, shrugged shoulders
>> (that's a hard problem that we can't solve), or embarrassment.
>> Since if the right people around here want something to happen, it
>> happens; I finally came to the conclusion that they didn't want
>> remote participation to happen, so it won't. That's a shame.
> 
> You haven't asked for this for the Cambridge DevSummit,

You did read the part where I gave up, right?

> but others
> have and so we have arranged for cameras and microphones to be
> available for two of the sessions (the DocSummit and the ARM working
> group) to allow those who can not attend in person for various
> reasons to participate.

Well that's a start. :) And where was this availability announced? If I
missed it, that's on me. But providing remote access that you don't tell
people about isn't really any better than not providing it at all.

> I don't know how useful it will be (hopefully everything will work,
> but my experience with video conferencing is that it stops working as
> soon as you try to do something important with it),

If I can offer some advice from the trenches ... focus on making the
audio robust, and put efforts into the video as resources permit. The
combination of solid audio, making presentations available on line, and
a chat room (IRC, jabber, whatever) allows for a great deal of remote
participation. Video is nice, but if the video going down takes the
audio with it, you're no better off than when you started.

> but there is
> certainly no active attempt to exclude people who can't attend.

... and here is where I need to push back. "No active attempt to exclude
people" is not the same thing as actively encouraging remote
participation. It's the latter that we're after.

> After each DevSummit, the results seem to appear on the wiki quite
> promptly - often during the sessions.  At BSDCan this year, two of
> the working groups that I attended used OpenEtherPad to take minutes,
> so they were available in real time for non-attendees and people
> outside of the room were able to add things to them.  There are
> usually people in the room on IRC as well, who are willing to relay
> things from people outside.

Those all sound like nice steps forward, thank you for pointing them
out. Nothing would make me happier than to be proven wrong in this area.
What would be nice I think would be if these steps were formalized, and
shared more openly. Having things on the wiki is nice, but reporting
things in detail on the mailing lists puts it in the archives for future
reference, as well as making it more broadly available to start with.

Doug

-- 

    I am only one, but I am one.  I cannot do everything, but I can do
    something.  And I will not let what I cannot do interfere with what
    I can do.
			-- Edward Everett Hale, (1822 - 1909)