Hi all,
We have three sets of office hours that I'd like to gather feedback on.
1) CentOS Stream office hours are monthly on the second Wednesday, the
same day as board meetings, at 17:00 UTC. This is a video meeting on
meet.opensuse.org. It always has a few attendees. Sometimes productive
stuff happens. Sometimes it's just a social hour, and that's ok. We
should keep this one. I wouldn't mind a time shift or a shift in which
week, because I happen to have another monthly meeting that conflicts.
2) CentOS office hours are monthly on the very next day on Thursday, at
10:00 UTC. This happens on IRC. Nobody attends, but we don't promote it
at all. The time slot is awful for the US. It's a great time slot to
bridge Europe and Asia. If we want to keep a time slot for Europe and
Asia, we need to find attendees from those time zones, because I'm not
awfully fond of waking up at 5am to look at a blank screen.
3) CentOS board office hours happen the week after the board meeting,
so third week, Wednesday at 15:00 UTC. This is a video meeting on a
Google Meet room I set up each month. The time slot is kind of early
for US Pacific (7am). The purpose of this one is to ask the board
questions about board stuff, so it's kind of important we have some
board folks there.
I'm open to rescheduling, canceling, consolidating, changing venues, or
any level of bike shedding. Office hours can have value. They can also
be a waste of time. Let's make sure we have something that adds value
for our community.
I'm worried that they are making participation in the project harder.
There's definitely value in high bandwidth conversation to work out something difficult or find a common understanding. However, the audience will always be very limited even if the call is open. I've distinctly noticed a lack of recap of these calls to a broader forum like the mailing list. That diminishes the value to the project as a whole.
If we're going to keep them, I really think someone needs to take the responsibility to summarize anything relevant to the broader CentOS community. Otherwise, we should move to one-off meetings as needed with the same requirement.
josh