Re: Candidacy : Jody Goldberg

[Daniel Veillard <veillard redhat com>]

On Thu, Nov 08, 2001 at 12:51:39PM -0500, Jody Goldberg wrote:
>     - Communication
>     GUADEC has been invaluable in dousing flames, soothing irritation, and
>     promoting 'gnome-love'.  Yet, as an annual meeting it is too infrequent to
>     deal with the myriad issues that arise during the year.  Things are
>     periodicly ignored, or duplicated  because there is no forum to get all the
>     relevant people together.  The board is _not_ the group to make decisions,
>     but it would be a good place to initiate the discussion and drag the
>     relevant folk to the table.

  Taking Jody's mail as the opportunity to open this question,
it's a relatively important point, Michael raised it too, and 
I think most of us would like to see more face to face meetings.
As you said the board don't have that much of power over this issue,
so far it scheduled 4 meeting this year. Not that many people did
show up at Usenix I assume  (someone can confirm ?), another meeting
was scheduled in Spain, but I never heard about the real outcome, 
and currently we should all be at ALS [*], I wonder how many people
are there (all I know is that Jim and Jonathan might be there).

  So what's the problem ? seems to me that it lies down to the
fact that people are not prepared to make many travel, be it that
most of us tries to have a life, or have a job where it's difficult,
or can't afford the travel for various reason (may not be just
the price of the ticket), or can't get motivated.

  I think it is crucial to keep GUADEC as a must-go meeting. This
mean the Gnome foundation need to preserve a quota of resources
for the event (money, manpower, advertizement, high profile for
companies emplying Gnome hackers). If simultaneously we can have
alternate meeting, fine, but especially with the current economic
condition we should preserve the main one. And I don't know how
to raise the resources pool needed to actually have more meetings,
well we tried to encourage more but this seems to not work very well.

  I don't know what are the best alternatives, maybe we should
hack on gnomemeeting like hell and get everybody to use it as well
as IRC, but this won't replace the social part which is the key
point of the face to face meeting (isn't it George >:-> !).

  If you have ideas on the matter, no need to wait for the Board or
elections to magically change things, I doubt it will work :-)

Daniel

[*] Well I'm not at ALS. For me it means: securing at least 5 days out
    of work with my employer, getting return tickets to California,
    and being nearly a week away from home. I can do this a few
    time a year but not that much. Also a meeting without knowing
    who will go at the event, what is scheduled to happen, who will
    talk doesn't compell me enough to "move my ass and get there".
    And all those "selling" points need a lot of time and volunteer
    work we know !

-- 
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