About the Monday's meetings...

[Stephane Delcroix <stephane delcroix org>]

To everyone involved in making f-spot better every days, Hi !

Remember the days, back in July, when we tried to hold bi-weekly
meetings about f-spot development ? That was fun, very exciting and
everything but obviously something went wrong since we just had our
first complete month without any of them.

Before discussing what went wrong, please let me remember you the great
things we achieved during/with those meetings:

In general:
- We agreed on a code committing policy (MoM 0601), and this policy is
really in use right now since we reached the critical minimal number of
committers.
- We agreed on a mission statement.
- We built the embryo of an F-Spot community, people knowing each other,
working together (by pair or small groups) on achieving goals

At the code level:
- We reviewed/enhanced/committed a huge amount of very useful patches
(XMP import, Queries, Picasa, ...)
- We developed and discussed some patches that are now almost ready to
be committed (icon size, plugins, rating, last rolls, ...)

So, why it failed ???
Here's my humble opinion, and saying that the meetings failed only
engages me !
- From very generic conversations in meeting 0601 (in which everyone can
give his/her opinion) we quickly moved to discussions about specific
patches (goals) or part of code involving only the small amount of
people knowing that part of code, i.e. the people who developed the code
or the ones who reviewed it in deep. This probably drop down the
interest of the non-developers/people who don't know about the specific
part of the code.
- We fixed goals for the next 2 weeks. As a remember, we defined those
goals as a specific issue people should look at in the time window. The
problem is, due to professional and personal priorities, almost nobody
in the people involved can guarantee that he/she will have 5 hours
available for f-spot. And most of all, in our f-spot time, we all prefer
working on our patches than reviewing someone else's work. It means that
just asking people to focus on a subject will not make them focus, at
least in a community contributed project.

So, the motivation and the interest dropped down under a critical
threshold, and we had to postpone sine die the latest meeting.

What can we do in the future ?
(still my humble opinion. if you're/want to be involved in f-spot,
please discuss)
- if we continue with meetings, don't discuss code there. bgo is
probably a better place.
- we probably can't fix goals. if we need attention/reviews/help on some
particular issue, asking is probably better than imposing goals... on
the mailing list/IRC/meeting ?
- if we keep the meetings, we probably need to only hold one by month,
agree on a topic list and stick to it. We also need to be sure that we
have something to discuss and that people will attend. If we don't,
postpone. It's important because due to developers living in different
timezones, meetings always ends up during the night / lunch time / work
time / family time for someone, and staying awake or waking up for an
empty meeting is very frustrating. 
- a lot of things, please add yours


Thanks for reading, that was only my thought about the meeting. Please
share yours so we'll know how to drive all the good will floating around
in a common direction to make f-spot better !

Best regards,

Stephane


-- 
Stephane Delcroix
stephane delcroix org