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Doug Hellmann wrote:
> Excerpts from Sean Dague's message of 2016-10-10 09:23:43 -0400:
>> On 10/10/2016 08:37 AM, Doug Hellmann wrote:
>> <snip>
>>> We had a lot of feedback that the unstructured discussion time from
>>> the Friday "meetups" at the summits were the most productive time
>>> for teams, but I'm sure there are quite a few cases like what you
>>> describe. Maybe the solution is to schedule part, but not all, of
>>> the PTG time?
>>>
>>> It would be hard to say that a particular day is or is not scheduled,
>>> because not all teams will have rooms available to them every day.
>>> We could slice it the other way, though, and say that multi-project
>>> topics should be scheduled in the morning. That still leaves all
>>> of the afternoons for less structured discussions. Of course, not all
>>> teams will necessarily have multi-project topics.
>>>
>>> We could also just say, as I think Thierry was hinting at elsewhere
>>> in this thread, that each team should publish its own schedule of
>>> topics using some sort of unconference-like system (notecards on a
>>> board, etherpad, whatever). That might make it harder to resolve
>>> conflicts, though.
>>>
>>> What do other folks think?
>>
>> I feel like when we went down this path for the PTG, one of the
>> assurances was that it would be unstructured time, like the midcycles,
>> which is very productive. Having a long running etherpad is fine (and
>> kind of expected), but I think building timeboxing in before the event
>> seems odd.
>>
>> There are so many unknowns here, but taking away one of the primary
>> things that made midcycles productive for people in teams, to optimize
>> for track hopping, seems odd.

I totally agree. We don't want to impose some structure or force any
artificial timeboxing. The only reason we do that at the Summit is to
align with conference talks time slots... But it's pretty clear from the
midcycles and from the Friday "contributors meetups" that the open
format is the most productive setup.

That doesn't prevent us from facilitating ad-hoc inter-team discussions.
For example, if you're Nova and you want to discuss QA or release
management, having some centralized way of announcing that you'll have a
given discussion at a given time will increase the chances that QA or
Release Management members will show up at the right time. But in my
idea it would still be very informal.

>> If there are topics that span teams, there are 2 days up front. Ensuring
>> there is space to expand topics into there would be good, and not just
>> make those horizontal effort days.
> 
> So you're proposing that we use time on Monday and Tuesday for
> multi-project as well as cross-project discussions? That works for
> me.  It may mean some folks who were planning to skip those and
> arrive later in the week will show up earlier and participate in
> more discussions.

Yes -- for pre-defined, major inter-project discussions, it's just
simpler to block some space on the first two days.

> Do we have space for those sorts of meetings on Monday and Tuesday?

It's still hard to predict at this stage, but we /should/ have extra
space on the Monday-Tuesday (there are more vertical teams than
horizontal teams). We plan to give rooms for goals, but if we know of a
particular inter-project topic that needs to be discussed, we can
dedicate a room for one or two days to that as well.

-- 
Thierry Carrez (ttx)