Management Committee March 16 2004

I. Welcome to Lisa, who has just joined us.

II. Hiring update. We think we have found some great folks. So our focus will move from hiring right now to 0.4 planning, especially for Katie and the apps team. We'll refocus on hiring after a break.

III. Notable events. Mitch asked if people feel well enough informed about activities in other groups? Seems OK for now.

IV. 0.4 Planning.

A. Currently:

Each group has a planning process going on, which is not yet complete and only partially written down. We've been interweaving inter-group issues. Hypothesis: the majority of what we need to do is to write down the thinking so we can create a plan and iterate on it.

There are a number of inter-group issues for which we have a plan. Then there are a few m ajor inter-group issues for which we need a plan, including those below. Mitch proposes that Product Management (lead by Chao) take over the process of working through these issues, as a new way of managing inter-group issues.

• Principals and contacts
• Collections, queries and views
• Access controls and sharing transport issues

B. Written Materials and the 0.4 release. The goal for 0.4 is to do enough with the written materials to pull together the relevant info about what we're doing in 0.4 into a single connection structure, which does not yet exist. Now we have info by working groups. We need to fight the impulse to stop and clean up and organize the documents; and focus on reorganizing just enough to be able to work efficiently.

Process Decisions:

• The 0.4 Planning Page is a beginning, but isn't yet tied into work plans for the groups. We'll create (hopefully rational, intuitive) links from this page to the working group plans so we have integrated 0.4 information
• We'll track the inter-group issues that need an owner until we have a clear owner and clear participants. Need a way to identify this and track it.
• Each group take a first pass in figuring out what their goals would be, and then we can rationalize. Mitch is gone next Tuesday, so we can't review then.
• We'll review an initial plan in 2 weeks at the Management Committee meeting. Then we'll be able to look at Canoga timing.

IV. Engineering Issues: we'll use the Management Committee meetings as an initial forum to address engineering issues that impact the entire group. (As we did for build issues.) Mitch wants to make sure that we're giving engineering issues enough time. So people should be sure to nominate issues that need this level of discussion. One topic we might consider is tht of Linux development: Is trying to have two systems on the same machine a burden? Are there problems with setting up a Linux environment? Are there other reasons that make it difficult to develop using Linux?

-- MitchellBaker - 19 Mar 2004