Re: Another teleconference partial edited transcript

On Fri, 11 Apr 2003 13:09:13 -0400 Havoc Pennington wrote:
>
>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.


Thanks for the (usual) thoughtful response.

>
>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.

Given the history, I'm not sure. Had someone other than Keith and Jim 
promoted a separate conference whose purpose was very close to the Forum's, 
I would feel better about it. It had the effect - for me at least - of 
deflecting the work of reconciliation and common goal setting. Once it was 
known that many of the principal discussants were meeting regularly, and 
separately, and that the content of their discussions was not immediately 
available, it called (for me) into question the role of the open exchange. 
Free speech and freedom of association are fundamental values. So who would 
question Jim's, Keith's, nor anyone else's, right to freely participate in 
discussions of their choice (in general). 

>
>Email just sucks as a conflict resolution channel.

It doesn't have to; depending on who's involved. But whatever the meeting 
place, if you want to resolve conflict you better have all the interested 
parties participating.

Leon

>
>Havoc
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