Community Working Group (CWG) Meeting 27 January 2004

Action Items from last meeting

• Pieter to figure out what it would take to make and post a video of a demo. in process
• Pieter to put recent Community Working Group (CWG) progress into the Status Manager's "summarize" feature. in process
• Pieter to talk to Katie and John about what talk Apps could give at OSCON. supposed to hear back this PM
• Pieter is to see about getting us a 90 minute slot to talk about both Apps and Repository. (Still waiting on O'Reilly)
• Ducky to write and post meeting notes. Done
• Ducky to post a request for help on PyCon sprints to StarterProjects. Done
• Ducky to set up the skeleton of a page that discusses code that the Chandler project has contributed back to other open source projects. Done, see ContributedCode
• Ted to blog that Andi contributed code back to the Lucene project. was waiting until his repository documentation was complete, but he will blog separately if the doc isn't done by end of the week
• Ted to send out a note with his current thinking on how to expand the repository developer community. Done

Pending Open Issues

• Should we invest time now to monitor the Python mailing lists defer until after PyCon
• Do we want to make sure that two volunteers don't try to work on the same thing, or do we not worry about possibly redundant/conflicting work? post the volunteer's name in StarterProjects when someone signs up to do something

Discussion

• Brainstorming on community goals (focusing first on repository because Ted was in the meeting)
  • Ted is hoping that we'll be able to find find a few people at PyCon -- that those topics are big enough to go beyond two or three days of sprints.
  • Ted is also hoping to get some discussion once he puts his proposal onto the mailing lists.
  • We don't think it's a good idea to ask volunteers to go on the critical path for anything; it's more reasonable to hope that we could get one, maybe two volunteers to work on repository by
    • assisting a developer
    • working on projects that are not critical for the next release (so they could go into the following release if they don't make it into next release)
  • Repository testing would be very useful, and good StarterProjects projects would be
    • coming up with a list of additional tests to do
    • actually writing each of the tests
    • edit/comment on Ted's repository doc
  • Very useful if someone could flesh out the performance testing
  • Very useful if outside people use the repository for other, non-Chandler projects

• Brainstorming on StarterProjects projects for the Community Group
  • See above on repository projects
  • Pieter to post request for help on host to post video to Web.
  • We should post StarterProjects projects to the appropriate mailing list.

• Ted's idea of summarizing IRC weekly
  • We agreed that it's not good if IRC has good info that isn't anywhere else, but unsure whether it was appropriate to spend a lot of time summarizing IRC logs. We decided that Ducky would keep an eye out for opportunities to do REALLY lightweight summaries (i.e. cut and paste transcripts into messages to one of the lists or wiki pages).

• PyCon (24-26th of March in DC)
  • Mitch has cleared Ted and Andi to go, though Andi might have local committments.
  • We are on for a PyCon sprint! The sprints start as early as the 20th -- Ted is unclear on how long sprints last.
  • While we are should schedule an official (if possible) or unofficial BOF (if not) and let the East Coast people know about it, since that will prolly be our only East Coast presence this year.
  • We should announce on web site and announce list as soon as we have our logistics set.

• Metrics
  • Right now, the metrics we have are kind of "fuzzy" -- not very tightly coupled to our goal of "ship Chandler". Heikki and Brian have suggested some metrics that are better (like lines of code, # patches, # bugs submitted), but they measure things that would be zeros right now. We decided that it was worth getting the metrics set up so that they'd be ready once we got contributing volunteers. (We also believe that when we get more volunteer participation, then the fuzzier metrics will fade away.)

• Film
  • Pieter has found that the raw resolution of the miniDV camera is great, but compressing to get file size down makes the text illegible. He wants to try increasing the size of the text and see how that works.
  • He is wrestling with appropriate file format.
  • Pieter has requested a donation of Premiere from friendly Adobe employee.
  • Pieter will post a request to StarterProjects for advice on how to get good video onto the Web.

Action Items

• Ted (and possibly Andi) to get PyCon logistics set up.
• Ted to find out if we can do an official BOF at PyCon.
• Ted to give Pieter a several-sentence summary of what a PyCon sprint is and why it is important for us to allocate resources to it right now.
• Pieter to wordsmith that above summary into an announcement for the Web site and possibly mailing list.
• Ducky to monitor IRC with an eye towards capturing bits and reposting to email or wiki.
• Ducky to write scripts for many more metrics.
• Mitchell to raise issue of non-code 0.3 deliverables to Management meeting.
• Ducky to put on agenda for next week: "what mailing lists/projects should we be paying attention"?
• Ducky to talk to Morgen/Jürgen about getting access to Web, Bugzilla, mailing list, and CVS info for metrics scripts.
• Ducky to write and post meeting notes.
• Somebody to post StarterProjects projects to mailing lists.

Next week's CWG meeting

-- DuckySherwood - 20 Jan 2004