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On Sun, Nov 18, 2018 at 11:09:29AM -0800, Clark Boylan wrote:
> Both ideas seem sound to me and I think we should try to implement
> them for the Infra team. I propose that we require agenda updates 24
> hours prior to the meeting start time and if there are no agenda
> updates we cancel the meeting. Curious to hear if others think this
> will be helpful and if 24 hours is enough lead time to be helpful.

My concern here is that we have standing items of priority tasks
updates that are essentially always there, and action item follow-up
from the prior meeting.  Personally I often find them very useful.

Having attended many in-person waffling weekly "status update"
meetings etc. I feel the infra one *is* very agenda focused.  I also
think there is never an expectation anyone is in the meeting; in fact
more so that we actively understand and expect people aren't there.

So I think it would be fine to send out the agenda 24 hours in
advance, and make a rule that new items post that will skip to the
next week, so that if there's nothing of particular interest people
can plan to skip.

This would involve managing the wiki page better IMO.  I always try to
tag my items with my name and date for discussion because clearing it
out is an asychronous operation.  What if we made the final thing in
the meeting after general discussion "reset agenda" so we have a
synchronisation point, and then clearly mark on the wiki page that
it's now for the next meeting date?

But I don't like that infra in general skips the meeting.  Apart from
the aforementioned standing items, people start thinking "oh my thing
is just little, I don't want to call a meeting for it" which is the
opposite of what we want to keep communication flowing.  For people
actively involved but remote like myself, it's a loss of a very
valuable hour to catch up on what's happening even with just the
regular updates.

-i