 This next talk is about how to organize better-in-person meetings, is Lucas Nassbaum. And please wait to get a microphone before you ask any questions or make any comments. Okay, thank you. So first, could someone try to connect to Gobi to see if it works? The IP is there? Okay, so it works. So Tim agreed to take notes, but please help him by editing directly the document on Gobi. So the topic of this book is how to organize better-in-person meetings. So it's kind of a meta-buff. So for three years now, I think, we have had meetings organized by a region in Spain of Extremadura. The city of Munich might sponsor, well, said they will sponsor and organize meetings as well. But those meetings cost a lot of money, a lot of time, especially for the local teams that have to organize them. I don't know if Cesar is here. Can't see him. Okay, so yeah, so Cesar really does a really great job in organizing those meetings. And it also costs lots of CO2 with all those flights going everywhere in Europe. So those meetings have two goals. First is to have fun with other Debian people. And the other one is of course to get things done during those meetings. So the first goal, I think that everybody will agree that we meet that goal. But the other one is really less easy to get right. So the goal of this buff, the point we reached at the end of the buff, is basically to find some recipes together about what people should do during buffs when some problems arise. So first, who already was at one of those meetings? Okay, that's quite a lot of people. That's nice. So maybe what we could do is simply that each of us who already was and was in those meetings start by describing which meeting it was, what from each point of view worked well and what didn't work so well. And basically if you liked it, if you would go again, or if it's just a lot of time, or yeah. So who wants to start? Do you want? Okay, Andreas. So I was joining. Just, Vios, please take notes because I won't be able to type while staying. I joined two meetings, which was basically, it was called the Linux, Debian, Ado, Debian and Tine. So these stuff meetings and we met in 2007 in November and in this year in March, beginning of March. And it was a really great meeting. We had done a lot of stuff. There was a lot of food, a lot of fun. And the only thing which was a little bit weak was the network connection and what we've somehow found a way. I just want to mention that Debian, Ado was called Linux people do also so-called developer gatherings, mostly in Norway. Sometimes in Germany. I also joined two of these meetings and was also quite successful. Quite similar to the extraverdura meetings, but I would say not so well equipped. So the accommodation was in schools and the mattress on the floor. But anyway, you get something to eat. You get a place to sleep and you can work fully for what you want to get done. And were there some problems that, were some things that disappointed you about those meetings? No, no. The only problem might be that it's a long traveling distance. You need one hour to reach this point and one day to reach this point and one day back. And this is kind of a big effort. I'm Ronda and I've been in 2006 to the I18N meeting, which was to my opinion quite a successful one. There were quite a lot of talks going on with people from different countries speaking about different special requirements like some fund session where it was discussed for the fund problems with Tamil, which has quite a deep impact and probably I don't think that it's integrated in the DI because of problems related to there. Yes, that's more or less of it. It was really quite nice and it was to some degree the starting point of Churro, the I18N server and all the tools surrounding it. Okay. Someone else? Well, who raised his hands in the beginning? Okay. Well, maybe you're allowed to disagree with Andreas and maybe even no. Okay, hello. So I was at the QA X Madhura meeting in 2007 I think and basically I can confirm what Andreas said. So for me it was the first time that it was on this kind of meeting and I found it very, very intense. So hacking basically from morning until late at night and I found it very well organized and I'm very, very grateful for the people from X Madhura to make this possible. For me it's the only, and here I only have to agree with Andreas, the only negative point is that it's quite strenuous also for travel. So basically you use two complete days for traveling and you have two or three days at a meeting where you can work. So there is some kind of overhead involved unfortunately. Just to add that to my eyes it seems to be very efficient to be in the same room. Many things can be done in a shorter time. As you said, it's intense. It would have taken months for taking some decisions by email and when you are in a single room then things, even if not everything is finished, you know what you have to do for the days after. So it's extremely efficient actually. Actually something that maybe I didn't make it very clear. The goal is not to criticize the way it was organized by the local team but well if there is a problem with that it's nice to tell them so people can just improve. But it's more about our way of working during those meetings because when we talk about my experience with that so I went to two QA meetings in 2006. I think Ralph, it was in 2006 that you were here. December 2006, yeah. In 2007 last year and during both meetings I had the impression that some people that came could just have spared two days of travel because most of what they did was just what they usually do on Debian at home, from home. It was a bit... Well I think in principle you often could do this alone but if you are at home there are so many things which distract you from doing anything. So if you would just at home could hide in a cave or something like this where some food is delivered you could maybe as effective as you are there but I think it's a big difference between being at home or staying at such a meeting. Yeah. Well on the other hand I agree that it's nice to be without external perturbations for a few days to work on Debian but also it would be... I think that we don't really make the most of the opportunity while we meet together and during the QA meetings for example there were not really lots of talks or discussions and it was a bit... I was surprised by that that it's really hard to get people to talk about what they are doing and how people could help. So I don't see it like that so I found that at 2006 it really was 2006 QA meeting there was quite some discussion people presented what they did and for me it was very... Yes in fact it was very fruitful because from the discussions there was a lot of synergy and a lot of new ideas coming up and so for me it's not only this thing that at home I would never be able to hack 12 hours in a row on Debian it's also that you are together with the other people you see them face to face to discuss with them and that makes these things really worthwhile. Well on the other hand you were one of those talking during that meeting so... In fact it was fabulous but we had to come to October centre. Does someone else want to mention something? While I wasn't at the QA meetings and stuff in Extermadur I for example attended an earlier QA meeting some years ago in Darmstadt and I think the main problem that you mentioned is that if you don't have anything to do with the others if you just work on your own stuff then the travel might be costing more time than it in the end brings you but if you have projects, current projects or planned projects that you want to do in a group I think it can really help to kickstart for example a project in a group like this so I think my point is first of all it can help if you have a plan beforehand what you actually want to do and look at the plan and judge whether it actually involves group activities or just everyone sits on their computer and makes their own stuff which can be for example a problem doing real life bug-splashing parties because everyone just works on their bug and they all talk via ISE and the other thing is you always have an element of chaos because we are not always the best of planners and sometimes something great can come of a meeting because some people find a new project or find a new idea in the discussions there and sometimes it just fails but that doesn't mean that you shouldn't try Well you mentioned bug-splashing parties and I felt that during the first QA meeting there were some discussions I'm not saying that everything was just wrong but most of the meeting was actually some kind of big bug-splashing party and if you've ever been to a bug-splashing party you expect it to be like that I didn't expect to meet things to be like that actually someone else wants to say something It is just an idea that has been mentioned at the last session I attended several people were concerned by the... and me included but several people were concerned by the carbon dioxide experience we make by taking the plane and a suggestion was made to maybe find a train and even gather people in train that would make people to start the work even before arriving at the meeting from a logistic point of view it might not be easy to do but that's not a too bad idea if people travel for example half a day together they can't prepare the meeting actually because one of the things that I would say it might have been better to have a more precise scale about what had to be achieved but on the other hand it's good to be able to go to whatever is relevant for the group or for the project sometimes it's nice to be efficient from the first day because we don't have jet lags and we don't have such when it's in Europe so maybe a scale is interesting yeah, German people have this kind of free software bus I don't know if some people are familiar with it whereas I go to conference by stopping in all the cities to pick up someone and then, well, we could ask them about that but I'm sure that's great yeah, anything else? one thing that worked quite well during the last year QA meeting is that at several points someone was just asking everybody to say a few words but what he was doing and this allowed at some times to discover that two people were actually working on similar things and to get them to work together so doing some kind of, well, one round table to discuss I think it might be the fact that the QA group in particular is not very well structured or organized all the time, not just on such meetings probably doesn't help for organizing so it's probably a good idea to as mentioned by others to really have some kind of schedule to have some kind of topics, to have some kind of activities that necessarily mean that people discuss something like having buffs or stuff like that because otherwise no one might take the initiative at the meeting itself so preparation can probably help there do you think that we should work on getting the QA group more organized or do you think it's fine like it is now? I don't think that's a primary goal, should be a primary goal but I think if we have a meeting then someone needs to take the initiative and assume some kind of, I don't know a leader position or an organizer position at least for this meeting and try to find some structure because what works well during the year on ISE and on the mailing list doesn't necessarily work in real life someone else, yeah another point that I found nice is that at two of the meetings I attended actually there were several groups meeting in the same place at the same moment at the first Debian CDD meetings there was at the same time an FAI meeting so it's always interesting to see the habits and the ways other groups are working at the second time it was both Debian Science and Debian Edu in the same time so it's interesting not to have one single group when the size of the group allows it someone else, well maybe you can actually I talked with Andreas during lunch and it came up with the idea of using meetings of our video conference using Echigar and some special server so do people think that we need that in addition to the usual way we organize meetings on ISE some teams do that use less some of the biggest benefits for any kind of real life meetings are actually outside the schedule so if you're only going to do multi-user video links and then you get breakages at either end and you get interruptions at the flow we had a meeting in MicroSign for the IAT&N teams and some of the contributors were trying to help with the meeting and give their opinions via IRC and breakages in the network and made that very very difficult sometimes you just need to be in the same place what we found with the Mdebian meetings is that if you keep it to a very focused group of people and actually make a smaller group who all have the same ideas for the same time period you do get a much more beneficial sort of outcome you know does someone else want to raise the point or okay then I think oh in the back okay yeah I don't know if Craig is here but he and I were talking yesterday night and he suggested that so this is in regards to this I guess the main debcon tracks anyway that we could have more lightning talks say begin the day with lightning talk signups I guess there were only so many signups for this evening's but if there were more of them I think we might be able to hear get a bigger audience for little snippets of what different people are doing and it might be nice to have can you repeat that? yeah sure so Craig and last night suggested that you might start every day at debcon with half an hour that is four five minute talks done by people signing up on the wiki as lightning talks so then you can hear more voices from people briefly to know what they're doing do you mean for debcon? maybe more suitable for debcamp well I'm thinking I'm thinking for debcon I guess to sort of maybe that brings some debcamp flavor to it but I think that there's enough there's a lot of people here both that I want to know what they're doing and who I might want to tell what I am doing times however many people there are and you think that people would be interested in talking like while doing lightning talks from time to time about what they are doing I'm sure that some people would I'm also sure that some people wouldn't yeah well I hope so yeah maybe that's something that we could do next year anything else? well I think let's go back to hacking okay thank you