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Matt Riedemann wrote:
> Thanks Chris. This reminded me of something I wanted to ask about, to
> all TC members, or those running for a seat.
> 
> 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?

The current meeting time is more a consequence of the current membership
composition than a hard rule. There is, however (as you point out) much
chicken-and-egg effect at play here -- it's easier to get involved in
the TC if you can regularly attend meetings, so we can't really wait
until someone is elected to change the time.

Alternating meeting times would certainly improve the situation, but I'm
not sure they are the best solution. Personally I would rather try to
decrease our dependency on meetings. Most of the meeting time is
basically used to force attention to a set of specific proposals, and to
communicate news. A lot of the comments/questions raised and answered at
the meeting could be raised and answered directly on the reviews, and on
specific discussion threads. I don't think there is anything we do in
meetings that we could not do elsewhere in a less... synchronous
environment. Avoiding the timezone constraints, and the noisy IRC
discussion driving most non-native speakers away.

It's not an easy change though. While it's easy to just stop meeting,
the usual result is that without the regular weekly drumbeat forcing all
TC members attention to the TC matters, everything slows down to a halt.
So if we end meetings, we need to replace meetings with some other
efficient synchronization mechanism.

I'm very interested in exploring our options there. The TC meeting is
not the only one which could benefit from such an inclusive approach to
coordination.

-- 
Thierry Carrez (ttx)