[User-committee] Efficiency of WGs?

David F Flanders flanders at openstack.org
Tue Aug 30 00:36:02 UTC 2016


Dear Working Group Co-Chairs and User Committee Chairs,

The logistical tasks of running a WG meeting is by no means trivial,
here a quick list of things which a co-chairs of a WG do on a weekly
basis to run a global meeting:

a.) mint calendar invitation to all members (subscribe/unsubscribe members)
b.) call for agenda items via etherpad
c.) update wiki with upcoming meeting and link to etherpad agenda
d.) email user-committee mailing list on when next meeting is
occurring along with agenda links
e.) assure meeting channel is confirmed (irc/phone/etc)
f.) run meeting according to good practices (irc etiquette or well
taken notes if via voice)
g.) post meeting follow up: circulating actions, posting meeting
notes, taking any outstanding queries to the mailing list for
consideration, etc.
h.) follow up actions.
i.) recruit new members
j.) plan for summit meetings
k.) etc etc.

All of the above are sometimes done twice-over at different times to
help maintain the conversation in different timezones.

In addition, the groups are still not well attended by as diverse an
audience as OpenStack represents.  AsiaPac, Latin America, India and
other massive OpenStack user groups have not yet engaged despite some
of their massive communities.

One of the recent suggestions has been to converge some of the WGs to
help ease the burden of these logistical tasks.

Other options include:

  * having a more systematic approach to when WG occur, i.e. agreeing
a set pattern such s a day per fortnight which each WG happens (one
after another).

  * having a shared IRC channel for all WG activity to help create
more water-cooler conversation between chairs?

 * sharing of logistical duties between WG chairs, etc

Options abound, though discussion much needed!

Q: Is there any good practice we can draw from? I've been digging
around my old W3C and IETF notes to see what good practice there may
be?

Discussion/replies greatly appreciated to see if there is any consensus?

Kind Regards,

Flanders



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