[OH-Dev] Proposed changes to devel meeting schedule

[Karen Rustad]

Hey folks,

So, last meeting, Asheesh and I discussed some possible changes to our
devel meeting schedule. Currently, we meet every Saturday at the same
time. Asheesh was worried that we were meeting too frequently, and
that not that many people were showing up. So, here's a proposal:

1. At the beginning of every release (roughly, the first Saturday of
every month, though since this release is getting extended it wouldn't
be until the second Saturday in this case), we have a release planning
meeting, where we talk about how the last release went and what our
goals should be for the next release, create a release plan on the
wiki (along the lines of http://openhatch.org/wiki/0.11.11), and
preliminarily assign tasks to ourselves and others. This meeting is
not for coding help, though if people want to powwow on OpenHatch
features or ask for help after the meeting is over, that seems like a
likely and reasonable thing to happen.

2. At the third week of the release (two weeks after the release
planning meeting), we have a devel meeting. These work essentially the
same as how our devel meetings currently work -- people reporting
their status, asking for help, and checking in to see if we are making
adequate progress towards our stated release goals.

3. During the Saturday meeting time on the other two weeks, and one
other day per week every week (TBD), Asheesh holds "office hours".
These are times set aside for Asheesh and other OpenHatch contributors
to be listening in IRC and help newcomers find FOSS projects to work
on or contribute to OpenHatch itself. (Asheesh, Jessica, and others of
course hang out in #openhatch all the time doing this sort of thing.
The point of having formal "office hours" is so we can publish them in
our contributor guide / wiki / wherever and point newcomers to a
specific time and place where they can get reliable help, since we
would otherwise be having devel meetings far less frequently.) Veteran
OH contributors are encouraged to hack on OH during office hours and
ask for help then, as well!

The results of this plan is that we would have 50% fewer formal
meetings per month, 50% more meeting times total (formal and informal)
per month, and release planning would get dedicated time (where if
you're interested in OH project planning, you can attend; if you're
not, you don't have to!).

What do y'all think?

-- Karen