Moving the specifications to full asynchronous communication

[Ken Finnigan]

All,

Back in October I raised an issue [1] around there being a lot of meetings and whether we need to scale them back. Since that time there are now more meetings and there are also concerns around the sync meetings excluding those of the community that aren't able to attend particular calls.

In today's MP Live Hangout I proposed the idea of ceasing all MicroProfile specification meetings in favor of doing everything over GH issues and this mailing list. I suggested that every two weeks (in the Hangout off weeks) the specification coordinator sends out an email to this list providing a status of the specification around current issues being discussed and any new issues raised. If some issues are unable to be resolved asynchronously, then a specification could hold a one-off sync meeting to discuss them. But sync meetings would become a rarity instead of the norm.

I know what I'm suggesting might be controversial, but to be a truly open source community we need to be able to operate in the same fashion as other open source communities. Namely that everything is done asynchronously.

Please provide your feedback and thoughts.

Regards

Ken

[1] - https://groups.google.com/d/msg/microprofile/eCFXGJ_fpac/s-NCPBMeAQAJ

[Ondro Mihályi]

Hi Ken,

I think that moving just to GH and Gitter may not be enough but I agree that having separating meetings for each specification is just too much.

I would still like to keep something like minutes for each spec, gathering all decisions from GH and Gitter discussions. This is more or less what you suggest with bi-weekly emails. But rather than just sending an email to the mailing list, I would prefer that minutes are kept in the google docs where they are now and just a short email with a link to the minutes is sent to the mailing list. Thus it would be easy to follow the history for a specific spec. 

Another option is to keep the meetings but make them just chats instead of video meetings. So people could regularly gather on Gitter if they need to discuss interactively and optionally elevate the discussion to video chat if needed.

Ondro

[Ken Finnigan]

I like the idea of the minutes doc becoming like an amalgamated log of all decisions for the specification. Though discussions might happen on GitHub issues, Gitter, or the mailing list, once a final decision is made it is logged in the Google document for the specification with the date, what the decision is, and links to relevant issues, etc.

That would certainly go a long way to providing a central decision log for each specification.

Having that single location I feel also strengthens the argument for removing the meetings.

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[Guillermo González de Agüero]

That would be great for those of us who can't usually attend the calls.

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[Ken Finnigan]

No other comments on this?

For a group that purports to be concerned about attracting a wider community of users and contributors, I'm surprised by the lack of comments on this thread.

There is still far too little traceability of what specifications are doing, either because it's happening in Gitter chat rooms, meeting minutes aren't being taken, or for any other number of reasons.

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[Mark Little]

Just do it and let's see how it works out in practice :)

Sent from my iPhone

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[Emily Jiang]

I think this is one of the alternatives. If one spec wants to use this approach, it should be fine. I suggest we should not force people to adopt this regardless. The individuals actively involved in a particular can decide whether they want meetings or not. As long as the specs can still move forward and the group feel comfortable, it should be ok.

Thanks

Emily

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[Kevin Sutter]

 Each MicroProfile Component is supposed to be creating Minutes for each of their meetings -- no matter the format.  This approach was discussed quite some time ago at our bi-weekly hangout since going through every Component's status at the beginning of the hangout was taking up too much time.  The header for our MP Hangout Minutes has links for these Component minutes:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/16v3jVkcDzVz9BVU5aGEzPVbK-a8BIx7S1gbqToVUaLs/edit#

Are these not being used and maintained?

-- Kevin

[Ken Finnigan]

I see the regular sync meetings as part of the problem, because it's an exclusive group of people that are either able to attend, or whom feel comfortable attending.

We need to consider that for newcomers attending these calls it can be very daunting to bring forward an alternative viewpoint with people who have been working on the specification for several years.

For, these are big reasons to push towards completely async, with rare sync meetings if absolutely needed.

Kevin, I don't believe all specifications are appropriately keeping the minutes document up to date either. Looking at some it appears there haven't been meetings for several months, which I don't believe is the case

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[Amelia Eiras]

Lets add this topic to next Community call. 

We got plenty of feedback during one of the Community calls where new comers interested in contributing their time coding in MP couldn't attend the weekly meetings and didn't know how to help b/c of lack of minutes documentation. 

I don't think that using gitter or slack works because it throws debt to those who are new or even those who are actively working on different specs. 

You are pretty awesome Ken to point out the lack of ownership or even adjustments on the weekly calls, even after this thread and that we got loud and clear open feedback via the call. 

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