Community Working Group Meeting 2 March 2004

Discussion

PyCon

One more (potential) attendee has signed up for the Sprint. Pieter is working the NITLE and CSG angles, and there might be some communication going out. Pieter to monitor.

BOFs are still getting organized.

Ducky suggested contacting users' groups in the DC area. Ducky to contact them and announce the sprints.

We should make announcements at places like Baypiggies. Ducky to contact Python users' groups and let them know.

0.3 Debrief

From the debriefing meeting, we reported that there was widespread disappointment that they weren't eliciting more involvement from the community: was the ROI high enough? One thing to do is to set expectations for the amount of work required from the presenters: spend no more than a half-hour on "what the most interesting thing that happened in the last three week", and be prepared for fifteen minutes of presentation. If there isn't any discussion, so be it.

It was noted that an ancilliary benefit of Office Hours is valuable internal dialog.

At the 0.3 Debriefing Meeting, Mitch said that the Community Working Group needs to be much more integrated with other groups. Mitchell noted that the Community Working Group needs to set some community goals: some should be leadership functions (pulling development along) and some should be following functions (supporting development).

Mitchell asked if we'd set expectations well enough for 0.3, and we generally agreed that we were satisfied with them.

There is widespread interest in metrics for the number of downloads for 0.3. Ducky thought that the downloads she was already tracking; Ducky to check on download metrics and communicate them to Mitchell, Heikki, and Pieter.

Pieter gave kudos to Ted for his blog entry about the 0.3 release.

0.4

The meeting was short, and we have a lot to talk about for 0.4, so we deferred 0.4 in favor of an additional meeting. Mitchell to send out a page with community goals.

Documentation

Ducky mentioned that, because of some comments on IRC, she realized that we were missing a page on the policies, procedures, and tools used to develop Chandler code. She started HackingChandler, but it is missing lots and lots of stuff. It wasn't clear how high a priority this should be.

Past action items from last meeting

• Ted to post 0.3/sprints announcement to Python and repository mailing lists. done, also blogged
• Ted or Pieter to post something to Freshmeat. Ted following up on this. Working on getting control of the project page for OSAF
• Pieter to contact company about sending a person to the sprints. they have pulled their programmer off the project they were working on, but Pieter will followup with the owner of the company to inform him
• Ted to find out if we can do an official BOF at PyCon. still waiting
• Pieter to put recent Community Working Group (CWG) progress into the Status Manager's "summarize" feature. deferred for this week
• Pieter is to get the word out to local colleges/universitites, especially CSG and NITLE schools. e-mail sent to Clara Yu with details of the Pycon Sprint for distribution to the colleges. In process with communicating to Jack for informing CSG
• Ducky to write scripts for several more metrics. not done
• Ducky to write and post meeting notes. done
• Ducky is to make absolutely sure that good "expectation setting" gets into the 0.3 release docs. done
• Ducky and Mitchell to rework community docs wiki. deferred

Action Items for next regular meeting

• Pieter to follow up on NITLE/CSG announcements of PyCon sprints.
• Ducky to contact DC-area users' groups and announce PyCon sprints.
• 0.4 meeting Friday at noon.
• Ted to gain control of the Chandler's freshmeat record.
• Ducky to check on download metrics and communicate them to Mitchell, Heikki, and Pieter.
• Mitchell to send out a page with community goals.

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, including getting/verifying releases?
• Discussion of Sam Ruby's discussion of wikis
• How actively should we encourage people to write non-Chandler apps using the repository?

Continue to next regular meeting.