[Dextrose] Developer meeting Notes

[David Farning]

I was going over the meeting log this evening and had a couple of points:
1. The Saturday morning developers meeting should be mainly technical.
<Silbe> 10:29:36> icarito: the purpose is to get us all to know what's going
on in AC, what others have been working / will be working on, etc." It is
mainly a chance to sync up with people who are working in other areas of the
project.  I hesitate to introduce much non-technical stuff.  It is very easy
to get into the habit of wasting 2 hour planning and scheduling next week's
meeting:-/ +1 to technical.

2. Once the general topics are covered, usually 40-60 minutes, we break into
individual conversations to follow up on points that were brought up in the
meeting. While every technical topic might be interesting, it usually only
directly involves a couple of people.  Asking everyone to sit through every
discussion is inviting trouble. It can quickly create a logjam where shares
their opinion about everything.

3. If you ever hit a logjam. Recognize it as such and move on. You can all
ways revisit the logjam. If you cannot resolve it on your own, there i s a
good chance I will step in and make a decision. (and that is a situation
that we all want to avoid) The primary motivator for most hackers is to work
autonomously.

4. Activity does _not_ do deployments. Running a deployment is a highly
specialized skill that requires an extensive understanding of the local
educational, technical, cultural, and political situation. AC helps
deployments by providing resources which are hard for local deployments to
provide for themselves.

5. Rotating leaders. - We often rotate the meeting leader. There are several
goals of this. Everyone develops the leadership skill to lead productive
meetings. By experiencing different leader ship styles we learn the pros and
cons of them all. And after having sat in the 'hot seat' of trying to lead a
productive meeting, we are more likely to realized when we, and others, are
getting off track. With experience we can lead how to bring a meeting back
on track. Silbe, who stepped up this week, is very good at running
productive meeting:)

6. Update plan for PY looks good.

7. Activities project - Now that Rafael and Sebastian have a couple of weeks
of productivity under their belts, they are asking the exact same questions
about activities as we asked about core Sugar development as we were asking
while figuring out Dextrose. These questions are not easy. But in general
they fall into 4 general categories: (a) How do we define and meet the needs
of our 'customers'? (b) How do we define and meet the needs of our 'upstream
projects'?  (c) How do we deal with conflicting needs between customers and
upstream projects? And (d) how do we allocate resources to best meet a, b,
and c?

david