Community Working Group (CWG) Meeting 10 February 2004

Attending: %ducky%, %sprout%, %pieter%, %mitchell%.

Action Items from last meeting

• Ted to blog that Andi contributed code back to the Lucene project. done
• Ted (and possibly Andi) to get PyCon logistics set up. in progress
• Ted to find out if we can do an official BOF at PyCon. in progress
• Ted to talk to Andi about further docs for the sprint.
• Pieter to figure out what it would take to make and post a video of a demo. in progress, not happy with the results of videotaping
• Pieter to put recent Community Working Group (CWG) progress into the Status Manager's "summarize" feature.
• Pieter is to see about getting us a 90 minute slot at OSCON to talk about both Apps and Repository. done; Andi's repository, Katie's Apps, might be 45 min, good time slot. Not allowed to set up BOF until later.
• Pieter to work with Heikki to revamp the "For Developers" section of the Web site. Heikki promises to have a plan by the end of this week
• Pieter and Ducky to look for "backgrounder" wiki pages for the 0.3 release. superbug Bug#1244
• Ducky to work out what Ted needs to say about copyright assignments. needs work from Mitchell
• Ducky to write scripts for many more metrics. in progress
• Ducky to talk to Morgen/Jürgen about getting access to Web, Bugzilla, mailing list, and CVS info for metrics scripts. done
• Ducky to write and post meeting notes. done
• Somebody to post StarterProjects projects to mailing lists.
• (In two weeks) Ducky and Mitchell to rework community docs wiki.

Discussion

Videotaping demos

Pieter running into technical difficulties. One difficulty that he had this time was the projected image getting brighter then dimmer. Ducky believes that's a well-understood issue that the camera and the display need to be synched. (Ducky presumes it wasn't a problem on the previous shoot just by dumb luck.) Ducky to ask her community access TV colleagues for tips on how to videotape computer demos well.

Pieter was also running into difficulties with legibility. Compressing the file to a "reasonable" size means destroying legibility; legible text means huge files (1.8G for a 7 min video.)

We started this project thinking that it might be a low-effort, nice thing to do. It is becoming apparent that it's not a low-effort endeavor, so might not be worth doing. Instead, it might be better/easier to do a "filmstrip" with a number of still shots with voice-over.

Help Us

Ducky to take action item to post things to mailing lists.

PyCon Sprint

Two people have signed up for the PyCon sprint. While we will probably get more sprinters once the conference schedule has been finalized (which is overdue), it might be worth doing some explicit marketing to encourage more people to come. Pieter is to get the word out to local colleges/universitites, especially CSG and NITLE schools. (Ducky lobbied for also contacting the CS departments of local universities.) Ted to post to Python mailing lists. Ted to look for repository-ish mailing lists and post there. Pieter to see if Mitch would be willing to blog something about it.

0.3 documentation

The 0.3 documentation should include

• highly technical stuff
• overview stuff
• logistics and coordination stuff
• licensing documentation

Pieter reported that he downloaded and played with the most recent build, and found the Bugzilla organization completely counter to what he saw. Bugzilla is organized in the way the programmers think, not the way users think. Mitchell said that from her experience with Mozilla, it's (also) bad if it's not organized the way programmers think. As a stop-gap, users should be told to file things under To Be Assigned and the dev team will assign and triage them.

We talked briefly about putting up a StarterProjects item for a bug-reporting tool built-in to Chandler, but the consensus was that it was too early for this. We might want to have it in around the 0.5 timeframe, but now is too early.

In particular for the "logistics and coordination", we need to make sure that there's good fleshing out of "what is this release, what can you do with it, what can't you do with it, what bugs do we care about, what bugs do we not care about, how do you file a bug, what category do you give it". Ducky is to make absolutely sure that such documentation gets into the release.

Communication

We talked very briefly about the IRC Office Hours format, and whether this "rotating presentation" format was working. Consensus was that it was working. Ducky noted that she thought the IRCs were good for internal communication -- that she's noticed that inter-group discussion seems to happen during the Office Hours.

Ted noted that he sent his query proposal to the dev list and got no reaction. He posted it to the wiki, and got comments from %brian%. He posted it to his blog and got a bunch of comments. We weren't sure how to act upon this observation.

Patches and process

Ducky talked a little about the QuantitativeCommunityInvolvementMetrics scripts, and mentioned that while she hadn't really started on anything about patches, she didn't see a programmatic way to distinguish between patches that internal people wrote and patches that external people wrote and that OSAF people checked in.

This launched a discussion of patch process and how patches get submitted. There was some feeling that at some point, all patches would need to go through Bugzilla in response to a specific bug, but concern that the OSAF developers would resist. This is a process issue, not a technical one -- tinderbox can cope with all kinds of metadata.

The patch submission process ends up being related to copyright issues. We'll need a way to figure out who has made what assignments.

Action Items

• Ted (and possibly Andi) to get PyCon logistics set up.
• Ted to post to Python and repository-ish mailing lists about sprints.
• Ted to find out if we can do an official BOF at PyCon.
• Ted to talk to Andi about further docs for the sprint. waiting on PyCon organizers for full schedule
• Pieter to figure out what it would take to make and post a video of a demo.
• Pieter to put recent Community Working Group (CWG) progress into the Status Manager's "summarize" feature.
• Pieter to work with Heikki to revamp the "For Developers" section of the Web site.
• Pieter is to get the word out to local colleges/universitites, especially CSG and NITLE schools.
• Pieter to see if Mitch would be willing to blog something about the sprints.
• Pieter and Ducky to look for "backgrounder" wiki pages for the 0.3 release.
• Ducky to talk to community access TV contacts about videotaping computer demos.
• Ducky to work out what Ted needs to say about copyright assignments.
• Ducky to write scripts for several more metrics.
• Ducky to write and post meeting notes.
• Ducky to make sure StarterProjects projects are posted to mailing lists.
• Ducky is to make absolutely sure that good "expectation setting" gets into the 0.3 release docs.
• (Next week) Ducky and Mitchell to rework community docs wiki.

Open issues

• What external mailing lists and/or projects should OSAF invest effort in paying attention to?
• Should Bugzilla be organized to make sense to programmers or to users?
• What will be the process for taking patches from volunteers?

See next meeting

-- DuckySherwood - 03 Feb 2004