[MirageOS-devel] About the fortnightly calls/meets

[Amir Chaudhry <amc79@xxxxxxxxx>]

[edited subject to suit the topic]


> On 5 Apr 2016, at 10:39, Richard Mortier <richard.mortier@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> 
> On 4 April 2016 at 17:06, Hannes Mehnert <hannes@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>> (resending, unclear why this didn't go through [maybe it will today?])
>> 
>> This is great.  Should we switch to canopy for the call from now on (and
>> collect agenda items under http://canopy.github.io/call/<date> -- which
>> are later to be filled first by a raw IRC log, and in a later commit by
>> more condensed notes (as last week, see
>> https://github.com/hannesm/canopy-data/commit/6870cafb536c1e0680f06bac244a4467a8a6743d
>> and https://github.com/hannesm/canopy-data/pull/6).
> 
> I'd be happy with that-- does anyone want to speak up strongly against
> doing that?
> (The feedback I've heard so far suggested it worked pretty well :)

I’m not particularly keen on IRC meetings.  :)

The one *vast* improvement over the other mechanisms is that logs are 
immediately available. 
However, there are a number of things I dislike about the format:
    - Meets take longer. Last one was almost a full hour and I’d say we covered 
about the same material (we normally finish calls in 20-35mins).
    - I found it difficult to follow as conversations overlapped occasionally
    - Slightly higher barrier to entry for joining/engaging (as opposed to 
clicking on a link)
    - Text-based comms can’t replace what you get with video/audio :)

Something to consider is whether IRC was only proposed because the notes from 
calls were always delayed or if there were other reasons. I’m aware that call 
quality has been bad recently but we previously used to use Hangouts, which had 
been fine (and before that it was GoToMeeting, which was also fine).  We 
switched to Jitsi to avoid the requirement of a Google account.  If it’s just 
about notes, then we could consider other mechanisms to fix that.

Of course, if most folks are keen on IRC meets, then please do continue. I may 
be the only one who’s not entirely convinced :)

>> would be great to reduce the number of places where new people can find
>> information (by removing arbitrary GitHub wikis, we should move the
>> Pioneer Projects to canopy as well!)
> 
> Yes! Indeed, we're in the process of making some updates to the
> OCamlLabs website and being able to federate content from multiple
> "pioneer project" sites was something I'd suggested for that too :)

I’m very keen to reduce the number of places people need to go for content but 
I hope we’re all aware that we’ve actually increased them (at least for the 
short term). canopy.mirage.io is another URL to point people to :)

In addition, it’s still easier to edit a GitHub wiki than a canopy site (of 
course, this may change as more features are added).

Regarding the Pioneer Projects, I’m very keen to get more tooling around those, 
such that they actually live as issues on repos and a webpage is constructed 
from them.  That could be on a canopy site, with the information pulled from 
issues. e.g. https://github.com/Unikernel-Systems/unikernel.org/issues/30

>> PS: I'm also happy to move the canopy-data repo somewhere else, if we
>> can preserve (and extend) the collaborators
> 
> I guess it might make sense to split the biweekly call notes from the
> hackathon eventually, but it doesn't seem urgent at this point...? And
> the existing repo could be moved to the Mirage org if you wanted I
> suppose.

If we’re choosing to use canopy to share the call/IRC/whatever details then I 
think splitting the content from the hackathon is a requirement.  We also need 
to (somehow) fold/link it in to the main site so it’s more discoverable.

Sorry if any of the above sounds like a buzz-kill.  I appreciate that there’s a 
lot of enthusiasm but I feel we should think through what we’re actually trying 
to achieve before implementing a bunch of changes. 

Amir :)


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