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On 10/04/17 13:52 -0500, Matt Riedemann wrote:
>Lots of projects have alternating meeting times to accommodate 
>contributors in different time zones, especially Europe and Asia.
>
>The weekly TC meeting, however, does not.
>
>I have to assume this has come up before and if so, why hasn't the TC 
>adopted an alternating meeting schedule?
>
>For example, it's 4am in Beijing when the TC meeting happens. It's 
>already hard to get people from Asia into leadership roles within 
>projects and especially across the community, in large part because of 
>the timezone barrier.
>
>How will the TC grow a diverse membership if it's not even held, at 
>least every other week, in a timezone where the other half of the 
>world can attend?

Glad you brought this up. John also happen to have hinted on this issue in his
reply to Thierry's question and I've brought it up quite a few times in the past.

I'm one of the community members affected by the time of our meetings, probably
not as bad as other members. I've been playing around with the idea of having 2
blocked slots (for alternate meetings) and only having ad-hoc meetings.

The governance process has evolved to the point where most of the discussions
can happen on the reviews themselves and there's no need for meetings for
(most?) of the changes.

Just to extend on your point about diversity, the problem with the TC meetings
is not only the time. Language is a barrier too. Some meetings are chilled but
others have a quite big amount of messages going through. This is a problem for
non native-English speakers because it's hard to follow messages coming from
other 12 members and be quick enough to read them AND reply to them before the
topic is changed. Let's not even talk about the times there are *multiple*
conversations happening.

So, yeah, one thing I've been studying for the last couple of months and that
I'd like to pursue in more depth is the idea of not having TC meetings except
for when we really need to have them and encourage other type of
collaborations/interactions between the TC members and the rest of the
community (emails, governance reviews, 1x1 conversations for mentoring/helping
some members, etc). For those cases when meetings are needed, then one of the 2
alternate times can be picked and the meeting chair will have to do moderate the
meeting in a way where focus is kept and chances are given to everyone. For the
latter we've used a "round table" model a couple of times, which IMHO worked
well enough.

I'll write a more detailed email soon(ish),
Flavio

-- 
@flaper87
Flavio Percoco
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