General Developers meeting, Tue 30 July 13:00 UTC

General Developers meeting, Tue 30 July 13:00 UTC

by Michael de Raadt -
Number of replies: 25

Hi, all.

I hope you can join us for the General Developers meeting happening next week.

Time 13:00 UTC on Tuesday, 30 July 2013
Meeting room Moodle Meetings YouTube channel
Chat Regular Dev chat
Twitter #moodledev
Docs Developer meeting July 2013

The meeting will be streamed live on YouTube with chat through the regular Dev chat room and comments on Twitter.

Agenda

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In reply to Michael de Raadt

Re: General Developers meeting, Tue 30 July 13:00 UTC

by Michael de Raadt -

Hi, all.

Just a reminder that we have a General Developers meeting tomorrow.

The agenda and details are in the parent of this message an on the meeting docs page.

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In reply to Michael de Raadt

Re: General Developers meeting, Tue 30 July 13:00 UTC

by Anne Krijger -

Hi Michael,

It's the 1st time I'll try and take part using the Youtube/Dev chat set up.
I see the chat is closed; I have no permission etc... 
I assume this will open up @ dev talk time? Or is there something else besides logging in that I need to do?

Anne.

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In reply to Anne Krijger

Re: General Developers meeting, Tue 30 July 13:00 UTC

by Anne Krijger -

Youtube and #moodledev work,
the dev chat https://moodle.org/local/chatlogs/info.php still gives "Sorry, but you do not currently have permissions to do that (View chat logs)" Not sure what I'm doing wrong...

++ on Unit testing forms

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In reply to Michael de Raadt

Re: General Developers meeting, Tue 30 July 13:00 UTC

by Paul Nicholls -

13:00 UTC again?  Rats, guess I'll have to watch the recording again!

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In reply to Paul Nicholls

Re: General Developers meeting, Tue 30 July 13:00 UTC

by Dan Marsden -
Picture of Core developers Picture of Particularly helpful Moodlers Picture of Peer reviewers Picture of Plugin developers Picture of Plugins guardians Picture of Testers Picture of Translators

yes - seems to be an arbitrary decision there too - the policy used to be that it would rotate...

http://docs.moodle.org/dev/index.php?title=Developer_meetings&diff=39341&oldid=39336

Michael - who made this decision? - doesn't make it easy for us to participate here in NZ

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In reply to Dan Marsden

Re: General Developers meeting, Tue 30 July 13:00 UTC

by Tim Hunt -
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Yes. Rotation occasionally sucked for everyone, but it was fair.

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In reply to Dan Marsden

Re: General Developers meeting, Tue 30 July 13:00 UTC

by Michael de Raadt -

Hi, Dan.

First, apologies for this change. It's not too great for Australians, but it is worse for Kiwis.

We tried doing the rotation, but there was a lot of bad feedback every time we shifted. The least objectionable time seemed to be the current time.

Also, now that we are providing reliable recordings, it was felt that having a regular time would be possible.

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In reply to Michael de Raadt

Re: General Developers meeting, Tue 30 July 13:00 UTC

by Paul Nicholls -

Hi Michael,

The recordings certainly do help - but the timing means that we kiwis can't actually participate (without staying up far too late for a work night).  Watching the recording afterwards is fine for catching up on what happened, but the rotation afforded us the opportunity to actually join in (by asking questions or participating in discussions in the chat) sometimes.

I wonder if the bad feedback you mentioned was because those who complained didn't realise that it was on a rotation?  Perhaps a clear message in the announcements about the rotation would have helped - something along the lines of "Can't make it?  The next developer meeting will be held: [month] [time], which may suit you better.  Developer meeting times rotate to give members of the community from around the world a chance to participate.  A recording will also be made available after the meeting concludes."

-Paul

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In reply to Michael de Raadt

Re: General Developers meeting, Tue 30 July 13:00 UTC

by Dan Marsden -
Picture of Core developers Picture of Particularly helpful Moodlers Picture of Peer reviewers Picture of Plugin developers Picture of Plugins guardians Picture of Testers Picture of Translators

That doesn't really sound like a robust decision process... perhaps the Kiwis aren't as noisy...

I do think there are some good reasons why standardising at a particular time could be a good idea but "bad feedback" and "reliable recordings" don't really seem to be good enough reasons to me and decisions like this should really be announced in the forums - changing a wiki page isn't good enough.

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In reply to Dan Marsden

Re: General Developers meeting, Tue 30 July 13:00 UTC

by Paul Nicholls -

Aside from letting people know, announcing it here in the forums would have given the whole developer community a chance to discuss the change - and perhaps come to a different consensus as to the best way to schedule the dev meetings.

Michael, are you open to starting a new thread to discuss this, with a view to changing the schedule (again) if there is wide enough agreement?

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In reply to Paul Nicholls

Re: General Developers meeting, Tue 30 July 13:00 UTC

by Dan Marsden -
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The discussion here is probably enough - If no-one else but the Kiwis finds the change difficult I suppose there is less of us than Europe/US based devs.

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In reply to Dan Marsden

Re: General Developers meeting, Tue 30 July 13:00 UTC

by Anne Krijger -

Since only contributors can take part in the active chat, I would suggest that their timezones should be the ones taken into consideration.

I'm sure there's a mathemagician among us who can devise a formula that takes contributing developer activeness and timezone into consideration and calculates the best possible time for the meeting.

I just had a look and it looks lime the best time for most would be UTC 8pm.
Only those couple of people in Perth would have to get up early then smile

Anne.

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In reply to Anne Krijger

Re: General Developers meeting, Tue 30 July 13:00 UTC

by john saylor -

while the notion of favoring people with the most commits/lines of code (whatever the criteria is) is appealing; i could imagine a situation where one region just starts controlling everything- it has the most devs and inertia is going to keep it there. this seems fair in a certain way, but it would serve to also lessen the likelihood that others who might be on the other side of the world would contribute.

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In reply to john saylor

Re: General Developers meeting, Tue 30 July 13:00 UTC

by Anne Krijger -

Just to make one of my points clear;

I was not suggestion that commits should be a factor.

I was suggesting that as ONLY developers who have contributed can take part in the Dev Chat, they should have higher consideration than those who can't.

Because for those of us who can not take part in the Dev Chat, there is not a big difference in following the meeting live or watching it at a later point in time.

Anne.

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In reply to Anne Krijger

Re: General Developers meeting, Tue 30 July 13:00 UTC

by Andrew Lyons -
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Hi Anne,

Just to clarify - anyone can join and take part in the developer chat on Jabber, but the developer chats are restricted and not publicly available.

Andrew

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In reply to Anne Krijger

Re: General Developers meeting, Tue 30 July 13:00 UTC

by Rex Lorenzo -

Unfortunately the "couple of people" in Perth are the majority of the core developers (majority, right?).

I was able to deal with the rotating time schedule and seemed more fair, since eventually everyone would have a timeframe that ranges from most convenient to less, instead of always having a really bad time slot or always being in a good time slot.

What if instead of random and rotating you see who has the best/most interesting stuff to discuss/demo and then workout a timeframe that is most convenient for the presenters?

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In reply to Rex Lorenzo

Re: General Developers meeting, Tue 30 July 13:00 UTC

by Andrew Lyons -
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As someone who is currently in the UK, I'm more than happy for the chat times to be rotated.

Just because someone hasn't yet spoken in a meeting, it doesn't mean that they won't have an interesting view, or important point in a subsequent meeting.

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In reply to Andrew Lyons

Re: General Developers meeting, Tue 30 July 13:00 UTC

by Michael de Raadt -

Hi again, all.

While it does seem fair to rotate through time slots, I think, in the end, it just ends up disadvantaging some people in favour of others. Ideally the best time is one that allows most people to attend, disadvantaging the fewest. When looking at the best times for meetings in the past I have considered the following graphic (source http://royal.pingdom.com/2011/05/19/internet-users-per-time-zone-chart ) (and similar ones)...

Users by timezone

Assuming most people are able (or at least potentially willing) to attend between 6am and midnight, holding the meeting at 13:00-15:00 UTC seems to fit best to the world population. Shift the meeting earlier or later and you start to encounter the problems I described. You could argue that this is not representative of the developers who contribute to Moodle, but I suspect it's not far off.

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In reply to Michael de Raadt

Re: General Developers meeting, Tue 30 July 13:00 UTC

by Tim Hunt -
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That diagram oversimplifies, in that it ignores daylight saving time. You really need two charts, one for northern summer/southern winter, and vice versa.

Second, we really want that chart weighted by number of Moodle developers (or potential Moodle developers) in each time zone.

At the extremes, for California the meeting was 06:00 to 08:00, which is probably on the boundaries of tolerable. (There are Moodlers in Alaska)

For New Zealand, it was 01:00 to 03:00. That is really very unpleasant.

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In reply to Tim Hunt

Re: General Developers meeting, Tue 30 July 13:00 UTC

by Dan Marsden -
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Was it only the NZ based devs that found the timezone un-pleasant? - I'd be interested in hearing if there were other internationally based devs that found it hard to manage.

I do think there are some possibly good reasons behind the change but I really don't think Michael has justified this well.

"I think, in the end, it just ends up disadvantaging some people in favour of others." - Michael
This statement seems a bit weird - you could Justify rotating the slots using a similar statement. Now we ALWAYS disadvantage a certain group in favour of another certain group.

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In reply to Dan Marsden

Re: General Developers meeting, Tue 30 July 13:00 UTC

by Michael de Raadt -

Hi, Dan and others.

It's coming time for another Gen Dev meeting in a week and there has been some discussion about times.

I've had another think about the issue after reading the discussions here and in Dev chat and I think we should continue to hold the meeting at 13:00 UTC. Once again, my apologies to those people wishing to attend for whom this time is not ideal.

As this issue continues to be discussed (and I think it will continue still), I thought I would try to justify this decision. Please see the following Docs page section and feel free to comment back here.

http://docs.moodle.org/dev/Developer_meetings#Why_are_the_meetings_at_13:00_UTC.3F

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In reply to Michael de Raadt

Re: General Developers meeting, Tue 30 July 13:00 UTC

by Michael de Raadt -

The docs for last Tuesday's meeting have now been updated. They include the video, meeting notes, list of attendees and chat-log.

http://docs.moodle.org/dev/Developer_meeting_July_2013

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In reply to Michael de Raadt

Re: General Developers meeting, Tue 30 July 13:00 UTC

by Anne Krijger -

Hi Michael,

Can you see and tell how many people watched the youtube channel (so far)?

Anne.

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In reply to Anne Krijger

Re: General Developers meeting, Tue 30 July 13:00 UTC

by Michael de Raadt -

Hi, Anne.

The video has been viewed 395 times at this stage.

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