[Bf-committers] No Monday or Tuesday meetings for the time, being

[Ryan Inch]

I agree with what Ray said in his last email, however, I would like to 
add that it seems to me you are further distancing the "core" devs from 
the community.  Modules will still have to coordinate and communicate 
with each other, decisions still need to be made regarding releases and 
overall direction of design, and issues that are relevant to more than 
one aspect of blender will still need to be resolved.  But, rather than 
doing this out in the open and allowing the community to participate, 
you've decided to remove open meetings and instead take everything 
behind closed doors.  I know that the weekly Monday dev meetings have 
been attended less and less, in part because the Tuesday Talks replaced 
some of what they were about, and so their relevance has been 
diminished, but they are still important.  People like to know the 
backstory as well as the final decision, they like to be able to see why 
a decision was made, what was considered, what was driving the decision, 
etc., and to be able to chime in if they have something relevant to add 
to the discussion or raise an issue that they feel should be discussed 
at the meeting, but the new format of announcing what has already 
happened completely eliminates this and bars the community from 
potentially adding their voice.  Not everyone participated actively in 
the meetings, but I'm sure I'm not alone in scrolling back through chat 
to see exactly what happened and what led to decisions being made.  
Iirc, when the Tuesday Talks were first introduced, it was requested 
that there be a way to watch the actual meetings; unfortunately, nothing 
ever came of that request.

In case I haven't made myself abundantly clear ;)
I feel that open meetings are an essential part of including the 
community and should not be abandoned.
I won't argue that the current format may be less than ideal and need 
some changes, but open meetings have been a staple of Blender 
development from the beginning and I don't think they should be 
discontinued, but rather, improved.

--Ryan



On 2021-02-09 06:00 AM, bf-committers-request at blender.org wrote:
> Message: 1
> Date: Mon, 8 Feb 2021 17:33:28 +0100
> From: Dalai Felinto <dalai at blender.org>
> To: bf-blender developers <bf-committers at blender.org>
> Subject: [Bf-committers] No Monday or Tuesday meetings for the time
> 	being
> Message-ID:
> 	<CAKD4fWdvWLzyH1HEkG2mymc5T42JCE1VDFteecYMszRq=h7aZg at mail.gmail.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="UTF-8"
>
> Hi,
> The Monday (developers) and the Tuesday (modules) meetings are currently on
> hold. The Monday one has very little quorum and is rarely useful.
>
> The Tuesday talks (module meetings) are quite a joy actually and I will
> miss talking to the modules owners 1:1. But they have always being more
> like a  healthy check then a permanent solution. What we need instead is to
> make sure the modules are properly structured and can operate autonomously.
> But this is a separate topic.
>
> I have a new idea on how to do the weekly communication of the ongoing
> module and projects:
>
> * We keep the weekly online page in devtalk for the weekly notes [1].
> * Developers keep adding their weekly reports there.
> * Everyone adds relevant announcements there
> * [new] Modules and projects then add their notes there as well,
> asynchronously.
> * [new] At the end of Mondays I do a final pass in the page and post it
> here.
>
> [1] - https://devtalk.blender.org/t/15-february-2021-upcoming/17475.
>
> Any feedback is welcome.
>
> Best regards,
> -Dalai-
> --------------------------------------------------------------------
> Dalai Felinto - dalai at blender.org - www.blender.org
> Blender Development Coordinator
> Buikslotermeerplein 161, 1025 ET Amsterdam, the Netherlands