27 July 2010, 5:23

Hi all,

How does everyone feel about the idea of a scheduled monthly developer meeting on IRC?

The idea stems from the Koha project (http://koha.org/) and how they manage their own international developer meetings - with agendas, roll calls and a public log of each meeting.  See http://wiki.koha-community.org/wiki/IRC_Meetings and http://stats.workbuffer.org/irclog/koha for examples.  These are just ideas and we don't need to follow the setup exactly if it doesn't suit us but it gives an example of how this is working for them.

Obviously we'd need to agree upon a time that ensures everyone is getting a fair deal and this might require alternating between making it nicer for the Northern and Southern hemispheres each month.  The Koha community tends to agree upon the next meeting time at the end of the previous one so that things like national holidays aren't booked by accident months in advance. :)

Please add your thoughts/questions and we'll see if we can get the ball rolling on this.

Stacey

28 July 2010, 4:14

Great idea. 

So this would be IRC (i.e. typing) rather than a voice call?

28 July 2010, 4:15

yes, yes it would :)

28 July 2010, 4:17

That makes the difficult hour of the day slightly easier.

28 July 2010, 5:20

>  this might require alternating between making it nicer for the Northern and Southern hemispheres each month

I guess you mean alternating between time zones, don't you? (I don't mind being on IRC with -6º C outside, but being on IRC at 03:00 AM is a different story )

Saludos.
Iñaki.

18 October 2010, 5:16

Sounds like a good idea to me.

Given that there are now 5 devs in the UK, plus Penny in .ch, I'd definately favour alternating meeting times. I've been thinking that we should have more regular meetings for a while now and I think that IRC is the best way to go.

Debian also use IRC for many of their meeteings and use MeetBot (http://wiki.debian.org/MeetBot) - I've not had any experience with it though and there may be other alternatives.

Andrew

19 October 2010, 3:25

Hello,

Yes, a monthly meeting would be great as the developer community is growing.

Let's figure something out for when Europe has switched back to Standard Time (at the end of October?). That makes trying to think of a meeting time easier as we don't have to keep that switch in mind and end up one hour too early / late.

The Koha community also has monthly meetings and they alternate times. Sometimes it's 7 a.m. for us in New Zealand, sometimes others have to bite into the sour apple as we Germans would say. Would we actually have to take the American continent into consideration? Are there any developers? I don't know of any. That would already make things a bit easier if we just have to watch out for up to Europe (Europe, Asia and New Zealand). Then it may not have to be 7 a.m. for anyone of us.

Cheers

Kristina

19 October 2010, 6:05

Kristina,

You might find this tool helpful for planning a multi-timezone meeting.

http://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/meeting.html

19 October 2010, 17:58

Hi Tim,

Thank you. I also have a timezone converting tool. They are really helpful. :-)

Sorry that I forgot about you at Dalhousie. Would you be interested in participating? You've been pretty active since you joined Mahara and had great ideas for future features etc.

Cheers

Kristina

19 October 2010, 7:13

Spain is switching back to Standard Time on October 31 (as the rest of EU, I suppose)

As to EU "vs" NZ (Madrid vs Wellington), it's exactly 12 hours apart for Central European Time (13 with DST).

Saludos.
Iñaki.