 Yeah, the goal of this discussion was to have a first, and maybe the last physical meeting between the DevCon for global team and the Swiss local team, if ever this distinction makes sense. Gardens has prepared a small agenda, and I think we should just go ahead with the discussion with these points. Although I don't like to be out here, I think it's just the most comfortable thing to be able to talk to. Do you want my microphone? No. If you're taking notes, maybe you should use the word. I'm actually not sure if we need to have this on video. Okay, but the point of the whole thing was that I don't have to lead the discussion, so I have time to tie it, actually, something. I can lead the discussion if you want, but just, it's the first time ever I read this copy, so just go ahead. Yeah, so I don't know if we need an introduction of who one is. Earlier in the week there was some confusion who's part of the Swiss local team, so I thought that might be good to have, but I know probably everyone knows everybody. So that's done. It was said that Gunnar is Spanish-speaking French, not Swiss. I don't know how, but I always end up being the local global something. There you go ahead. So next we wanted to discuss the expectations. Well, I don't know what you mean by that, so just go ahead, you. Yeah. Well, I mean, most of the disagreements or tension that has been between the global team and the Swiss local team is that we had quite a big amount of meetings in Switzerland, face-to-face, that were not RCE recorded, that were not videotaped, and that mostly ended up in a big pile of Wiki commits, Wiki pages was many organization ideas and or implementations and stuff, and I guess this is the time and place to have this resolved so that we can go ahead in a common understanding, I think. So I guess we should just start with the communication and meetings sub-point. Well, we decided on part of the Swiss team, we decided that it was valuable for us to have many face-to-face meetings and it effectively proved to be quite useful, at least for some, in some's opinion. The question is now if we are entitled to continue to do this, if it makes sense to have this only local-ish meeting still happening, if we should do more RCE meetings, we have also tried to do some Mumble meetings. And all in all, the thing was quite going quite well but despite Swissling being quite small, it still might end up in two hours of trying to go to the meeting and two hours back for some people. Opinions? Opinions, I mean, it's good to have local meetings, it's, I think you can do great job if you can meet face-to-face, but yeah, I don't know how often do you want them to be? I mean, I think it's completely up to you. It's good for us if we have the meetings where we can participate, but I understand many things still have not required involvement from people outside the country or can be just reported, I know. Yeah, I don't think that, there's no problem at all with having local meetings, it's a positive thing. Once, it also depends partly on the stage we are at of the debcom process, that it's completely natural in the early stages, especially when the non-local people don't really have time to focus on the local issues and as you get towards debcom itself, it becomes natural again to have crisis meetings about solving local things quickly and so on. But debcom is part of Debian, so it's good as well if we can use some of the standard ways that Debian works, which includes trying to be as open as possible and inclusive as possible for who can be in things, which tends to mean things like IRC meetings just because even if it's inconvenient for people to get up at some funny time of the night, there will be people who will be at the IRC meeting at two in the morning or at six in the morning because they want to keep what's happening. Just reacting to this, although I quite agree in the debcon 12, the repetition of IRC meetings was decided during an IRC meeting and I mean we should just send out a call for dates or something or discussion in an emailing list because if I was not to be able to attend on certain week, then in my case it was just because I could not attend that day all week, so I ended up not being able to attend any meetings just because, you know, real life. Yeah. I think what my vision a bit of how we should work together is that we kind of keep having local meetings in whatever form, maybe sometimes face to face, maybe not if it's in a form that's convenient for the global team to also attend, yeah. Or for non-local globals to also attend then the better and that we should really be aware and maybe even prepare a list of things that have to be coordinated in globally and then there to work on proposals to the mailing list. I think in the first phase until next year probably and many things can be done like having a proposal and discuss that on the mailing list. Yeah, so I think everybody here realizes how little I've actually participated in dev couple organizations, so I don't need to tell you to take anything I might say and recommend with a grain of salt, but as far as the consideration about the concerns about having meetings that the global team can't involved in, I feel like that's a proxy for problems where people manage to become de-synced about what requirements and goals actually are and so it's much more important to try to externalize those and perhaps that word expectations. Externalize what it is you're trying to achieve and have good documentation that the knowledge is shared that basically everybody's on the same page even if they can't be in the same place in real time. I think I would like to see DevConf do more of that and in fact that's actually one way I'm hoping to get involved in the DevConf organization this cycle in part because sometime in the future we may or may not actually consider doing a Portland bid and I would love to actually have, it's important not only for knowledge sharing across time zones for a current team but also for carrying the knowledge forward between years and I know you guys have certainly tried to do that in the past but I would just encourage more of the same. Can you just clarify what you mean by this? I'm not sure what yours is. Clarify what I mean in practice. So like is there documentation out there that says what the hard requirements are for? That's the point that was skipped on the agenda before. There is some documentation answering to your question. We have managed to make several of our workflows written and we follow them. Of course several others we have never written and we should but yeah this point we skipped that was now brought back to attention. Thank you. One of the points we want to work after finishing this conference is to start making a manual for it to have it organized in a coherent way. Yes exactly my point. Yeah. But work on this menu has started. There's wiki menu pages for certain aspect. There's some missing but there's many things described. So it's not really. On the specific point about the meetings again just normally at this kind of stage we have monthly IRC meetings of the global team which means everyone including local team. It is perfectly natural that the local team so-called want to have extra meetings or discuss things and so on but although it's I know it will be boring for the local team it's boring every year that you have to have these other meetings too and you may feel you've already covered things or you may feel frustrated that you can't make a proper decision until that meeting but that's kind of the reality that this is Debian's money we're talking about spending there has to be some kind of process and structure on that. I mean the way Debian works is not purely that we take a different group of people each year and give them direct control. There is a more continued structure than that. I mean one thing that would be interesting to know we had this meeting we always send or mostly send agendas and always send minutes. Did you find this helpful? Did you feel somehow excluded from certain decisions and if yes which ones do you think we already tried but we're learning which decisions we can take on our own locally and which decisions that need to be coordinated globally? Well as for my point of view and back to the point where I was surprisingly given a microphone I didn't request, well not only having a physical meeting takes time for you but it also takes money you have to travel by train which is well maybe cheap maybe not I don't know but yes I found your minutes very helpful very important to understand what's the status and what can we expect? I must say I don't always read it thoroughly especially now that we have a pressure to work and what's really burning. But yes I think there will, whatever we decide here whatever we say there will be a complementation. I mean you will keep having some meetings even if most of the work is done by IRC and I think it makes a lot of sense for most of local decisions to do them online if you live in different cities if you have to travel well it's just not wasting time but close to it. Yeah well one thing that we did that was probably the most controversial and probably the most Swiss was this division and sub-sub-sub teams in the end my conviction after having also seen what happens here is that of course there is a global network team but on the other hand of course there is a need of local people handling the if there is fiber there that takes the contacts with the local people and that makes sure that when the global network team enters that camp there is something to work on and I mean yeah there is I mean we also have to work this on and the process and the teams also have to evolve to match what will in the end be the reality and I mean it's yeah. Do you think that we should consider using how do you say this collaboration software where you keep track of the advance of several tasks it may be the right team to do it because it requires being very organized but it can help giving an overview of what's missing. Well one thing we did on the wiki was sort of some sort of global planning that includes all the preparation meetings until DEPCONF we wanted or we at least had the idea of having a weekend that is side of team building but side of working that would be useful to have before DEPCONF and including the feedback process to have after DEPCONF. I mean one or two months after we just gathered together in one weekend we make sure we finish the final report that we send this out we do some sort of meeting to discuss what went well what didn't went well also to how to give us something for the next years too and this some sort of task repetition across time and what should be done when is which we somehow did it on our own on the wiki but it could I mean if we had some sort of task management system or I don't know what scheduling thing that would also allow others than us to see okay we're in this, this is the task that is late and this is the next coming task. I know this is quite a lot of bureaucracy certainly but on the other hand it can bring some clarity in what's happening what are, yeah it's an open question. I'm not completely sold on us trying to use some specific piece of software for this however one of the things that I have on my to-do list and I would be very happy if people could work together to do is compiling from effectively from minutes and so on of previous years what happens at what stage and so on because we kind of have, some of us kind of know this in our heads anyway but it would clearly be sensible to have this written down obviously they'll be in practice some divergence each year you won't precisely get the t-shirts printed the same date and so on but even for things like that it would make sense to have written down a date we expect this to be done roughly this time before deadcon and so on. I think there's a lot of benefit from that the additional benefit from a particular piece of software may be outweighed by the fact we're all geeks and have different views about what's good software and so on so yeah. Yeah just to put the, I mean ignoring the software but looking at the process I mean my feeling is there needs to be some template of like almost like a business plan or a project plan whether that's mapped with some software or some database or a spreadsheet is not so important but the high level, the global meetings will work on the template itself and on the business plan and the local team can fill in the gaps like the local knowledge that needs to be added like to answer the open questions in such a plan and the global team would simply review those answers so that's where the local team would step in because that business plan would ideally be reusable as a template from year to year. I don't know what we have at the moment but from what I've heard there were things that people were not sure about until the last minute at this conference. So, okay, I kind of agree and disagree at the same time. I kind of agree and we have done like a plan with milestones when we will have, would like to have done what over the, but it's very coarse grained. Yeah I think it would be nice if we did this as a global team not just with people doing it. I mean that was a proposal. I think the thing about our minutes is always also to gather commands from the global team or from the whole depth com team that's why they're sent there. So if you have this or also for the agenda if you have to say something about it then just say it on the list. And the other thing is what I would really, really like to avoid in what I think it's also in the spirit of this merging global and local team and just rather talking about them having locals in the depth com team that's by the definition global and is that there's a thing of global managers overseeing a local team. I don't, are you saying, I don't understand what. Yeah, one interpretation of what Daniel said could also be there's a team of global managers that just oversees and directs a local team and I think that's something that should really be avoided. In some, I probably agree with you but I equally a different interpretation of what you're saying is true in that it is not, again it's not about global versus local people know but it is true from my point of view that the global team meetings and global email lists and so on are what make final decisions. The local team in this is not about penalizing the local team it's exactly the same safer video team. These are the same relationship to the global team. The local team is people focused on local issues. The video team is people focused on video but just because the video team, they clearly know much more about video they've got a better idea. They know how to spend the budget but still at some point that decision comes to a full meeting of the entire team which approves it. Yeah, and on the other hand I think we should also keep the dual classy spirit of Debian. So finally it starts doing the work, doing it. But again the people who, the local team are also part of that decision making about at the global level. It's not A versus B. It's just that some level of decisions which clearly there's a kind of slightly grainless about what is a sufficient decision or whatever but some things are things like actually agreeing the money spending are the practices they are agreed by the global team. Just to respond to that issue of whether it's a global team managing or directing the local team. That's not what I intended. But what I intended was to capture the things that everyone expects as participants in DevCon. Because that's what makes the event a success is all the participants, not just the people organizing the events. Everyone comes here with different expectations and capturing those expectations in a plan that can be cookie-cuttered into any country. That doesn't have specific things about what food we will eat or what internet company we're gonna use or anything else. It'll just have some very broad things. And then the local team would show the initiative to fill in those gaps. Like to give an example it might specify that has to be 10 megabits internet connection or something. It won't say how it has to be obtained or anything else. And the local team could even come back and say, oh, we have 100 megabits. It's wonderful. But there wouldn't necessarily be dates on things that have to be fixed from year to year. The local team would put that in as well. So it would just be a review process with the global team. That's all I was getting at. Not some sort of dictatorial approach from the top down. So two things. The first is we had to go through the checklist. And the checklist has most of this. I mean the 10 megabits thing, the thing that you have to host attendees and stuff. The other thing I wanted to say is it has been quite frustrating for me when after we did this planning, the answer we got is you should not have done this while you should not have done this. This should have done differently. And it was frustrating for me because I would rather have appreciated some sort of answer like you have done work, that's good. We thank you for this work and now we can base something on and we can benefit from this energy. And yeah, I wish we would have found a better way to use our energy and also use a feedback process to have future uses of our energy better than just being just turned down for everything. Not everything, but for some things we did that were just turned down into, okay, you have just spent the night for nothing and this should not have been done. And yeah, it's just frustrating. Can you give an example for that? Well, at least the division in sub teams and the agenda was just mentioned. I don't know if it was directly written or IRC comments by some or said here, but it's been my feeling that it has been turned down that way. And maybe it's just me. I think it's sensible if the local team divides itself into several groups and works on different things and not everybody works on everything. But I've not seen it really turned down this day yet. I didn't see it that strongly as video I put it now, but I had somewhat the same feeling that also this talking about the Swiss somehow got a bit into your too much focus on your thing or had some component that could just take a bit the enthusiasm out of what we are doing. And I think that you probably also have to be aware to avoid that. Well, for many of us, a big problem we have is misunderstanding socially what we say when we speak. I mean, here we are, everybody stressed with his very specific field of focus, say right now I am very happy because nobody's scheduling things anymore. But I see this guy was almost killing somebody very recently. But yeah, there's always jokes on the locals. I mean, I can probably tell you the tagline for each conference we have been to. And it's always a joke on the locals. I know it can be sometimes frustrating to be stereotyped, but I don't know, we don't hate you. I don't know what to do with. This year was quite unexpected for me. Was that you already worked on DevCon 13 before we finished DevCon 12. This has hardly ever happened. Definitely not in this, in the same impact you had. Many things I have not read most of your meeting again in us because I was busy with others. I think that's part of the problem. I think that's partly why you don't feel a lot more appreciation of these from us because we're kind of, there's so much information there. I don't think that this would have been a problem in the sense that if it was just to have been ignored, but more like, yeah, finished, all good. And the other part I wanted to say is that I think that there is a lot of documentation which surely can be improved, but I think the hard part is that writing the documentation can only do the people who know the stuff, and those people who know the stuff are busy doing the stuff. So that's the usual problem, and I would appreciate if the local teams, or if not the local team, the current team, that somebody in that team writes documentation. Yeah. I mean that, I think that that's something because try hard to do this cycle that every step we take, we also try to write according to the manual page for this or afterwards, that should, I think that's something that local and global and whoever just have to do equally. Well, something we have to try this time is that it's usual that we are all burned by the end of the conference, but we should not take this six month vacation. Yeah. We have a lot of things to do before six months, and the sponsorships, the conference management system, the documentation, final report, we have to do it before you're being in the middle of the center. No, I'll finish. No, I only point to the sponsorship because that's something we have always done much too late in the last few years, and that's part of the reason that we've not got more money, and we need a lot more money for Switzerland, so it is very important. Yeah, I think we've almost covered this topic, something more on the practical side. There was a suggestion that we could, I don't know if already now or rather in autumn, merge the local team and DEBCON team mailing list because they're all in English anyway. Do you think that's a good idea? I considered the question, and I wonder if it's really, I mean, it's also good, well, maybe there will be some local noise about discussing network, blah, blah, blah, specifics that are specific to Vomarcu and look on the venue, that wouldn't be, I mean, the only thing I fear with that is to have people disconnect from DEBCON team because there's too much local noise. I mean, if that's also the sponsoring mailing list, then various other things, okay, then, yeah. Why not? I think nothing that's related to the conditions of the venue we will have is of topic for DEBCON team. I don't think the local traffic will be too high. It's often much the contrary. Yes, of course, the sponsors thing requires very different following. I think the sponsors is not the material to go to the main team list, but... I think for the sponsorizing, only preparing the brochure and the material that we will send them is on topic on team and afterwards it needs to be a bit more private, probably. As far as, I know it's done that in previous, that way in previous. On the, just to be clear, on the question about documenting things, again, I think there were some, some people were, discouraged a little, but I think, again, in the opposite direction, from the Swiss team minutes, where it appeared that things were being discussed kind of from first principles as if there was not an existing experience on these topics. And while I would entirely agree, many things may be able to be much improved and done better, I think it's a little, in the other direction, it's also not really appreciative of previous, say if we say we really would just throw away the existing video team and do it differently. It's not really appreciating the previous work, even if someone has a better idea. It's better to discuss these things with the teams in question first, even before posting to the list a really strong proposal on a different thing. I mean, I think in both directions as a question of making sure everyone understands that they, we all do appreciate each other's work. Yeah, one idea that's probably new, we also had that's the last point on the communication meetings. Topic is that we would like to invite everyone from DevCon team that wants to attend to kind of a sprint, probably five months before DevCon for something, which could even be held in AdlerComp in Walmart Q or somewhere different, so that we have a second time in the middle between now and DevCon 13 to meet in person again. What do you think about this idea? It has been great. It has been done for two years already. I mean, they went to Bosnia some months before the conference. We two came to Managua in May. I think it helped a lot to get communications really rolling with the local team, especially there that we didn't know each other for years beforehand, but it helps a lot to get a good overview of the situation and changes many things completely for it. Of course, it doesn't make any sense for everybody to travel. For example, I don't think there's any justification for me traveling to Switzerland just to see if you're doing well. Yeah, I think that should be handled by a similar process as we do travel sponsorship. Now, if you have money enough to bring you to the better, but yeah, maybe. Another thing I see just from above is the hard to reach consensus on lists. That's also a thing we have been discussing in the local meetings. No, but it might end up that we have to take decisions and it's not really clear, at least not for me, who does the final decision for what amount of money? I mean, if it's, Debian TH has some assets that could be used for something that is Debian money, I mean, it's turning around the leader running. And yes, there are some stuff that we might end up paying as Debcon money or as Debian money and it's not really clear who can decide this. And yeah, oh, again, open question. Yeah, but didn't we more or less solve that in the meeting we just had outside? The meeting we have some days have over, right? Yeah, I think by now, at least as I see it, everyone agrees to the idea that we have a budget approved by the DPL and then we're allowed to spend money according to this budget. And well, this year, and I think that's a good practice to keep, we agreed on some thresholds so as not to require every expense to be individually approved by the authorized people. I mean, this time, for example, every expense less than $50 can be done by a local team member. So something like that, of course, with the levels adjusted to the money we have and the expense, how expensive life is in Switzerland. Well, we reach some levels and that will be. I mean, what I just said still leaves the question open then within the DEPCON team, who decides to actually spend something that is within the budget? I think, for example, if there is a decision that has to be made, if this thing that captures the BGA out and makes it to be the oil breaks, I don't know about it, I will not care to approve it but I know the people in the video team will. I don't think the people in the video team should approve it. No, I think this should be a team decision and they're like the whole budget. I don't think it's right, but Gaudens said that the DPL decides or agrees on the budget. The team, the global team decides on the budget and also because we don't spend Debian money there, we spend sponsors money which we have acquired to get Debian and so the DEPCON meeting decides about the budget for which this DEPCON is planned. If we need like this year 10 or 20,000 euros from Debian, then the DPL decides about this budget. But DEPCON works independently, or not independently, it works on its own. Besides this question, I just take the opportunity to have the microphone. One thing that we could do is also do a partial responsibilities budget. I mean, we could just globally agree that well there are 20K for video and this person is entitled to spend that money until we reach 20K and after that he comes back to the meeting, to the global team and ask for more if needed. I think that's obvious that we don't micromanage people. If you say people should buy, get food and we spend 2000 euros or whatever, some, then I don't want to define where to buy the stuff. That was more or less what I was meaning. We know which people are working on which general areas. So the people, I don't think we as a whole team have to go to every decision. Of course if we're buying expensive equipment, yay, it's more important. But again, making the delegation, the budget delegations explicit are way better than just saying everyone knows here who is the video guy. I mean, if it's written somewhere that Holger is the video guy, it's better for everyone I think, or whoever else. Except for me. Yeah, I think at least in the money meeting we had the proposal was a bit more like having an organization in Switzerland that organizes Debcon and having an agreement between this organization and Debian that basically says this organization will organize Debcon on behalf of Debian and then the money flow is more or less it's, Debcon is done with Debian money and this organization is going to invoice the Debian trusted organization on based on the reason organizing Debcon and not for individual things like we bought that and that or we spent whatever on it. And that's a bit, yeah. Just to respond to Holger, I think that's more on the level that there at least was an understanding that all the money is actually Debian money and there's no such thing as this is Debcon's money. Debcon is part of Debian, but that doesn't mean it doesn't do this. So yeah, there is Debcon's money, it's also Debian money. There could also be DI money. If DI, the DI team decides to collect money to do food. So it's their money within Debian. So it's also the Debcon money is Debian money within Debian. Well, it's just, it's just in the Debcon budget. Yeah, Debian money. Yeah, that's, I agree, fully agree to that. That's, yeah, and I mean it, the time is out. I see that I kind of would like one to do one last thing and that's to create a list of where there is the most global, local overlap. Where do we really have to be cautious to work together and not to do global or local decisions alone? I think that might be helpful. I think there is no deciding why there is no local team. There's just one global team deciding it. And the global team obviously includes local. There are things that it's really not helpful to have to go to all the global overhead, all over again and again. I understand there are some things that are somewhat trivial. So, but we don't, we cannot set a red line. No, just because it's not possible to have a definite list for the whole time and everything and all doesn't, at least to me, not mean that it's not helpful to have some things collected where we should really pay attention. I think you can do that off video and whatever. I first can perfectly comment on DebConf related things by private IRC with whatever, whoever else and we're not hiding information from the rest of the team. I mean, if you work on some things locally, of course, you will have some information the others don't have, but if it's not something relevant to comment, I see no problem. But in that case, can we agree on trial and error? I mean, for example, the logo process is quite running somehow locally these days and we were somehow planning to decide the final logo on our own. I mean, that could perfectly be debatable and we could perfectly bring the decision to global team. But we could also just go ahead and then if there's a problem, then we get the red flag and we try to improve. I don't know. I think this will end a lot when you switch the local team mailing list to DebConf team. Then we will just discuss it in the team. I think the mailing list and the IRC meetings are the body where we make decisions. Yeah, but there will be also face to face meetings continue. Yes, but don't expect them to be binding for the global team. You can discuss anything you want anywhere, but don't expect that to be binding for the global team. Yeah, I think, and maybe part of the question here as well as just having too much of a view of any decision being absolutely final. Actually, in DebConf, no decision really is ever a final decision until DebConf is finished. Rough consensus and working DebConf. So, I mean, all decisions may have to be, because it's a real event we're doing, all decisions may have to be revisited. It's not just because of someone else. We can try that. I kind of feel that it's gonna be quite frustrating for some, for several issues because it's just hindering work, but yeah. It's very, it's, to me, it seems quite complicated, but yeah. So, thank you, Lekha.