Re: Moving WeeklyUpdate meeting to 11 AM Pacific? LAST CALL for objections!
Mitchell Baker
we have a time that works for the Americas, but nowhere else. That time
is a remnant from 1999 when we were *all* in North America. It seems
odd to me that we don't move this to a time when some other time zone
can join us. A giant chunk of our users and contributors are in Europe,
and we can make things significantly easier by moving a couple of hours
earlier. (We should also get good archives so that other timezones can
at least watch if they want.)
The big objection I've seen to moving the meeting is that the time is
better spend in individual discussions with European contributors and
that the meeting isn't worth taking that time away. If the meeting
isn't worth the time it takes then we should fix it or shorten it or
abolish it. Many people want the meeting to be "better" but very few
people say they don't want some regular project-wide way to connect. I
don't think those of us in the Americas should decide for everyone else
that it's good enough to spend some time on but not theirs.
The last meeting, where a set of interns described what they are working
on, seems a perfect example of how there is relevant info that isn't
available in distilled form elsewhere.
So this is a last call for any other objections I should consider.
Absent some big new issue I've missed, I'm planning to make this change
sometime in July.
For those people who are able to join us, I will ask you to think hard
about what you'd like to have happen at this meeting, how to make it
more worthwhile. I bet a fresh perspective will be helpful. If the
meetings are beneficial, that's great. If they are a disappointment
then please help us improve them.
Mitchell
Gervase Markham wrote:
> On 19/05/09 04:02, Mike Connor wrote:
>> To explain that last sentence, we basically have two hours each day
>> which are reasonably conducive to getting active participation from
>> Europe (by active I mean discussions and questions, etc).
>
> I assume you mean 10am and 11am PST (7pm and 8pm Europe)?
>
>> Like I said, it's whether this is the meeting we should optimize for. I
>> really think it'd have to be 10 AM to not screw with everyone's lunch in
>> PST, and that means we lose 20% of our best time each week for meetings
>> with people in Europe. I'd rather kill the meeting than eat those times,
>> tbh.
>
> Are there meetings which aren't on the community calendar?
> https://wiki.mozilla.org/Community_Calendar
> It seems that the two key slots (assuming I've understood you rightly)
> are not filled every day. Or do people use Thursday and Friday morning
> for smaller, unpublicised meetings with European collaborators?
>
> Gerv
Mike Connor
On 24-Jun-09, at 4:22 PM, Dan Mosedale wrote:
> On 6/24/09 12:52 PM, Mitchell Baker wrote:
>> [lots of sound reasoning elided]
>>
>> So this is a last call for any other objections I should consider.
>> Absent some big new issue I've missed, I'm planning to make this
>> change sometime in July.
> Great!
>
> Is the plan that when daylight time changes happen, the meeting will
> remain nailed to 10AM Pacific and may move for other participants?
I'm not sure we settled 10 vs. 11, Mitchell's seeming to indicate we'd
move to 11. I am much more in favour of 10 than 11, as I argued
earlier in the thread we probably don't want to run into lunchtime in
MV, since that will create a bit of a hard wall with people wandering
off to eat.
-- Mike
Mitchell Baker
I checked with Karen, she didn't think lunch at the end of the meeting
would be a problem.
If we move to 10am we run into the problem that people are really rushed
trying to get a handle on the week before the meeting starts. Too easy
for nothing to happen before the meeting, rather than get in, do a bunch
of work to get the week rolling before breaking for an 11am meeting.
Will check on this.
My initial take is that the meeting time -- currently 11 pacific in my
thinking is "nailed" to the pacific timezone. I realize this could
reflect my california-ness :-)
Mitchell
Mitchell Baker
I checked with Karen, she didn't think lunch at the end of the meeting
L. David Baron
> Is the plan that when daylight time changes happen, the meeting will
> remain nailed to 10AM Pacific and may move for other participants?
I think keeping the meeting pinned to North American summer time
changes is the right thing to do.
I think a large majority of the participants will be in a timezone
that observes northern hemisphere summer time rules (either North
American ones or European ones), particularly since a large number
of the Mozilla community members in places that don't have northern
hemisphere summer time have the meeting in the middle of the night
anyway (East Asia, Australia, New Zealand). For more details, see
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:DaylightSaving-World-Subdivisions.png
(where the distinction that matters is blue vs. not-blue). (There
used to be a good map somewhere on wikipedia that had lines
separating areas that followed different summer time rules, but I
can't find that one right now.)
If we pin to North American summer time rules, then the meeting is
an hour earlier in Europe for a few weeks in the spring and fall.
If we pinned to European rules, it would be an hour later in North
America for that same small set of weeks.
Pinning to European summer time rules is a possibility, but I think
keeping the time consistent for the largest number of people
probably wins, and I suspect the meeting has more participants in
North America.
-David
--
L. David Baron http://dbaron.org/
Mozilla Corporation http://www.mozilla.com/
Robert Kaiser
> If we pin to North American summer time rules, then the meeting is
> an hour earlier in Europe for a few weeks in the spring and fall.
> If we pinned to European rules, it would be an hour later in North
> America for that same small set of weeks.
As an hour earlier is even easier for Europeans to make the meeting, I
think that's the best thing to do.
Robert Kaiser
Mike Connor
On 24-Jun-09, at 8:13 PM, Mitchell Baker wrote:
> Mike Connor wrote:
>> On 24-Jun-09, at 4:22 PM, Dan Mosedale wrote:
>>> On 6/24/09 12:52 PM, Mitchell Baker wrote:
>>>> [lots of sound reasoning elided]
>>>>
>>>> So this is a last call for any other objections I should
>>>> consider. Absent some big new issue I've missed, I'm planning to
>>>> make this change sometime in July.
>>> Great!
>>>
>>> Is the plan that when daylight time changes happen, the meeting
>>> will remain nailed to 10AM Pacific and may move for other
>>> participants?
>> I'm not sure we settled 10 vs. 11, Mitchell's seeming to indicate
>> we'd move to 11. I am much more in favour of 10 than 11, as I
>> argued earlier in the thread we probably don't want to run into
>> lunchtime in MV, since that will create a bit of a hard wall with
>> people wandering off to eat.
>> -- Mike
>
> I checked with Karen, she didn't think lunch at the end of the
> meeting would be a problem.
On what level? Logistics? My concern is that we'll feel pressure to
wrap up the meeting because food's waiting and everyone's hungry.
I've seen it before, and I don't think it's the best situation. We
frequently go over an hour, so maybe 10:30 AM?
> If we move to 10am we run into the problem that people are really
> rushed trying to get a handle on the week before the meeting
> starts. Too easy for nothing to happen before the meeting, rather
> than get in, do a bunch of work to get the week rolling before
> breaking for an 11am meeting.
> Will check on this.
I'd like to think that if the meeting has value, especially in terms
of presenting an overall organization context, it would be the best
kickoff for the week we could have. Knowing what the shape of things
is will generally make it easier, not harder, to plan and drive into a
week effectively.
-- Mike
Mike Shaver
> On what level? Logistics? My concern is that we'll feel pressure to wrap up
> the meeting because food's waiting and everyone's hungry. I've seen it
> before, and I don't think it's the best situation. We frequently go over an
> hour, so maybe 10:30 AM?
In my experience, every time you add time pressure to a meeting, the
quality of the meeting improves quite quickly. This meeting is a
valuable resource, but it's also a high cost, in that you're talking
about literally hundreds of person-hours of time spent on the call.
Constraints are liberating. :)
Mike
Mitchell Baker
The lunch we bring in on Mondays was initially designed to make the monday meetings more effective. Both providing lunch so everyone is there rather than getting lunch and in the timing.
We can move the lunch to 12:30 if that makes more sense, or 1pm. There's no reason it has to be at noon exactly. Maybe 12:30 or 1 will be better for those who don't get up at 6 or 7 in the morning.
You're right, it's different; maybe it won't work out. We'll see. I know that 10:30 will be a problem for the steering committee in its efforts to make the most of the week; its current 10:30 meeting has already proved this. That's a small number of people but also the one longtanding meeting that is shifting to accomodate this.
mitchell
Mike Connor
On 26-Jun-09, at 12:12 PM, Mike Shaver wrote:
> On Fri, Jun 26, 2009 at 12:09 PM, Mike Connor<mco...@mozilla.com>
> wrote:
>> On what level? Logistics? My concern is that we'll feel pressure
>> to wrap up
>> the meeting because food's waiting and everyone's hungry. I've
>> seen it
>> before, and I don't think it's the best situation. We frequently
>> go over an
>> hour, so maybe 10:30 AM?
>
> In my experience, every time you add time pressure to a meeting, the
> quality of the meeting improves quite quickly. This meeting is a
> valuable resource, but it's also a high cost, in that you're talking
> about literally hundreds of person-hours of time spent on the call.
> Constraints are liberating. :)
This is a fair general rule, but in my experience, that generally
works by constraining discussion and avoiding deep-diving on subjects
that can be followed up later. Short of everyone's updates simply
consisting of "just go read the wiki" I don't think we're going to
carve much off the schedule.
-- Mike
Dan Mosedale
people reading their wiki section aloud don't strike as a particularly
good use of time.
Dan
Mike Shaver
Mosedale<dm...@mozillamessaging.com> wrote:
> Why is that a problem? The portions of the meeting that consist of people
> reading their wiki section aloud don't strike as a particularly good use of
> time.
Having people present has nice social benefits, but I agree in the
large: I would rather hear a summary and additional focus on things
that people want help with for the "active presentation", while
hopefully having everything also captured in the wiki for the many
people who can't be there real-time.
Mike
Mike Beltzner
> Having people present has nice social benefits, but I agree in the
> large: I would rather hear a summary and additional focus on things
> that people want help with for the "active presentation", while
> hopefully having everything also captured in the wiki for the many
> people who can't be there real-time.
Are we designing the structure and content of this meeting? I was
pretty sure that was explicitly called out as a non-goal for this
discussion by Mitchell back when it started, but perhaps I am mistaken.
I would recommend that we not conflate the topics, too much, as the
latter can lead to a much broader discussion which would, I fear, not
be on topic for dev-planning (while this discussion of when the
meeting should take place very much is!)
cheers,
mike with the moderator hat on
Mike Shaver
> Are we designing the structure and content of this meeting? I was pretty
> sure that was explicitly called out as a non-goal for this discussion by
> Mitchell back when it started, but perhaps I am mistaken.
Goes to minimum required time-slot, your honour.
Mike
Dan Mosedale
> On Fri, Jun 26, 2009 at 12:42 PM, Dan Mosedale<dm...@mozillamessaging.com> wrote:
>
>> Why is that a problem? The portions of the meeting that consist of people
>> reading their wiki section aloud don't strike as a particularly good use of
>> time.
>>
> large: I would rather hear a summary and additional focus on things
> that people want help with for the "active presentation", while
> hopefully having everything also captured in the wiki for the many
> people who can't be there real-time.
>
that we try and simultaneously use the wiki as both a script for the
meeting and as a place to fill in notes for posterity ends up messing up
the way we think about the meeting. I wonder if we wouldn't do well to
explore separating out those two functions.
This has wandered a bit from the original question about changing the
time. However, my impression is that there are quite a few folks who
aren't terribly happy with the current format of the meeting anyway (I
include myself in this set). So one possible tack would be to go ahead
with a time that does impose a constraint, and assume that we're going
to need to modify the format to deal with that constraint pretty quickly.
Dan
Mike Connor
On 26-Jun-09, at 12:45 PM, Mike Shaver wrote:
> On Fri, Jun 26, 2009 at 12:42 PM, Dan
> Mosedale<dm...@mozillamessaging.com> wrote:
>> Why is that a problem? The portions of the meeting that consist of
>> people
>> reading their wiki section aloud don't strike as a particularly
>> good use of
>> time.
>
> Having people present has nice social benefits, but I agree in the
> large: I would rather hear a summary and additional focus on things
> that people want help with for the "active presentation", while
> hopefully having everything also captured in the wiki for the many
> people who can't be there real-time.
So how do we get there? Can we switch to a system where we separate
the agenda for what people want to present/talk about and confine the
current "here's what we did last week and this week" status updates to
the wiki notes? Right now the meeting and the wiki are basically the
same content, which creates a positive time pressure on people to be
concise, but I think also makes it unlikely that anyone would dare
spend five minutes on anything.
Personally, I'd like to see us spend more time on a subset of the
content of the wiki notes. Not sure who would be good to make this
call, but if we only got up and spoke about "big things" I'd probably
find this a lot more valuable, in the same way I think the newsletter
has been a real success.
* Project kickoffs (i.e. Mozilla Creative Collective,
hacks.mozilla.org, marketing campaigns)
* Product releases (i.e. new AMO, significant milestones for Labs
projects)
* Major milestones on projects (i.e. working PoC for Electrolysis)
* Requests for help from across the community
* etc (not an exhaustive list)
-- Mike