On Tue, 18 Dec 2018, Zane Bitter wrote: This is such a great message that I feel obliged to respond, even though I haven't got much to add. But I will anyway, because I love email.
Of those options I think I have to vote for 1. The 0100 Wednesday is (temporarily) the only one I can actually attend, so I'm in favour of keeping it. I'm also deeply sceptical that having fewer office hours will boost interest.
Agreed.
TBH I'm not actually sure I know what we are trying to achieve at this point. When the TC started office hours it was as a more time-zone-friendly replacement for the weekly meeting. And the weekly meeting was mainly used for discussion amongst the TC members and those folks who consistently follow the TC's activity (many of whom are hopefully future TC candidates - the fact that largely only folks from certain time zones were joining this group was the problematic part of meetings to my mind). However, recently we've been saying that the purpose of office hours is to bring in folks who aren't part of that group to ask questions, and that the folks who are in the group should actively avoid discussion in order to not discourage them. Then we are surprised when things are quiet.
I believe where we went wrong was thinking that people want us to answer questions. I'm sure there's some desire for that, but I suspect there are plenty of other people who want us to _do stuff_, some of which is hard stuff that requires the big talks and major efforts that come about from reaching consensus through fairly casual conversation.
(A more cynical person than I might suggest that going searching for trivial issues that we can 'solve' by fiat offers a higher dopamine-to-time-spent ratio than working together as a team to do... anything at all, and that this may explain some of its popularity.)
Dopamine Ho!
IMHO our goal should be - like every other team's - to grow the group of people around the TC who form the 'governance team' for which the TC members are effectively the core reviewers, and from which we expect to find our next generation of TC members. While doing that, we must try to ensure that we're not structurally limiting the composition of the group by longitude. But I don't think we'll get there by trying to be quiet so they can speak up - we'll get there by being present and talking about interesting stuff that people want to join in on. If there's a problem with casual contributors making themselves heard, provide them with a way to get their topic on an informal agenda (or encourage them to begin on the mailing list) and make sure it gets raised during office hours so they are not drowned out.
Yes. "Talking about interesting stuff" seems to have tailed off a lot lately. -- Chris Dent ٩◔̯◔۶ https://anticdent.org/ freenode: cdent tw: @anticdent