Meetings and mailiglists/decision finding process

[Thorsten Leemhuis]

Hi all!

I'm wondering if we should optimize out decision finding and realizing
process a bit. The weekly IRC meetings have some problems:

- we often get only four or five people from the steering committee
(sometimes only three)
- sometimes there are periods where the meetings get stuck for one or
two minutes because people often do other stuff in parallel
- only rare attendance from non-steering committee members
- the usual time-zone and real-life comes in between problems with IRC

At the same time on the mailing lists

- stuff gets discussed, but then often things seems to get stuck because
everyone waits for the steering committee to make a decision; those are
done in the meeting only (e.g. only once a week), and things then get
stuck if no decision can be found easily  or gets bumped between list
and meetings
- things get agreed on on the list and then suddenly out of the blue
some steering committee member raises concerns in the meeting (but did
not raise them on the list beforehand). That complicates things a lot,
as explaining stuff ("I don't like foo bar and baz, but foobar, and want
...") in IRC often is boring for the others as they have to wait for the
other to hack all that into the keyboard.

All those (and likely some other stuff) slow EPEL down IMHO and are
sometimes annoying. I'm wondering if we could improve the situation
somehow with some changes, but I'm unsure myself how.

Some ideas, from the top of my head:

- only meet on IRC every second week
- only meet on IRC all four week or when there is a need to
- somehow accept stuff on the mailing lists if possible. Kind of "send a
proposal, if some people give a "+1" on the list and no one objects from
the SIG within some days consider it accepted". Sure, it's often not
that easy and we needed to work out more details for such a scheme, but
it could be  or something into that direction. That way the SIG or EPEL
contributors get more influence and we might need the Steering Committee
only if a decision can't be found
- weekly status mail from the owners of major tasks

Other thoughts/idas?

CU
knurd