Re: Another teleconference partial edited transcript

On Fri, Apr 11, 2003 at 12:53:07PM -0400, Leon Shiman wrote:
> 
> The meetings are closed and minutes are edited. Haven't we had enough of 
> that? 
> 

The transcript is edited for typos (and in the last one, the removal
of one potentially-offensive offtopic joke, for example).

Phone conferences are a very good way to get things done in a
project. You really need to do either that or IRC, because email is
just not up to the task.  Emotional/flame-inducing conversations are
very much best had over the phone. Phone conferences can also help
keep action items from getting permanently back burnered.

If you have a formal way to decide who attends the phone call
(e.g. GNOME has two calls, the board and the release team, with
attendees being the members of those groups), and then publish
minutes, it offsets the fact that it's not an open forum.  A
transcript is even better than minutes if people have time to write it
and read it.

The way we bootstrapped the GNOME Foundation was to come up with a
fairly arbitrary "steering committee" of core developers and they met
on the phone and got things moving, then were eventually replaced by
the foundation board.

If some XFree86 BOD members got on the phone with Keith and others I
bet a lot of stuff would get sorted out in one direction or another
pretty quickly.

Email just sucks as a conflict resolution channel.

Havoc