tsunam
Developer
Joined: 23 Feb 2004
Posts: 343
|
 Posted: Wed Feb 13, 2008 10:37 pm Post subject: Minutes from the User Relations Meeting |
 |
|
Minutes provided by Matthew Summers
| Code: |
tsunam started the meeting by introducing a short agenda, as follows.
1) Google SOC
2) Ways to revive user relations as we've been sorta meh for a while
3) ways to get users more involved
4) ways to get information out better
Antarus, then, spilled his burrito, which brought us to the following discussion.
The user-relations project's activities and responsibilities include:
-Resolve conflicts where possible, and find creative solutions to them. Help to work through ongoing conflicts, miscommunication, and other such issues that affect our relationship with the user community.
-Help to turn 'more communication' into 'better communication'.
-Understand and appreciate different project types and management styles.
-Collaborate with, and where possible learn from, the user community.
-User-relations acts as a form of umbrella project, providing resources and input to the projects in its area of responsibility. Some of the things we can do for projects include:
-Arrange cross-project meetings for discussion of issues that affect more than one participating project.
-Develop and carry out user surveys, and other methods for gathering input from the user community.
-Provide a central source of information and resources to make user-focused projects' jobs easier and more productive.
-Encourage and facilitate sharing of experience and expertise amongst participating projects.
It was agreeed by tsunam, antarus, fmccor to discuss some of the finer points at a later date.
An Action Item:
fmccor: One thing we might do is (1) update the project pages to reflect current membership; (2) note who is available to help resolve conflicts (I know I am, and I believe dmwaters is).
1) Google Summer of Code
It was agreed that Gentoo should apply.
-jmbsvicetto: tsunam: As I recall the 2 largest problems have been: lack of mentors and lack of progress reports
-antarus: I need to write a mentoring guide
-nichoj: having a list of possible projects is good and bad. good because it gives students an idea, but bad because you end up with lots of similar proposals, usually without much further research from student
-tsunam: so we need
--1) idea's and ones that are fleshed out ahead of time
--2) mentors who have the ability to be some
-irasnyd: nichoj: maybe require a "why I want to do this project" or "why I chose this project" with the application?
-quantumsummers: we could provide a team of subject matter experts , acting as liasons to the larger developer pool, to answer questions in a rapid manner (i.e. return answers within a day or less) to address any lack of knowledge on any particular Gentoo project (ex. portage).
- jmbsvicetto: I think it could help if mentors tried to work in team. If a student has a problem and isn't able to reach his mentor, it would help if another mentor could help.
Also, it was agreed that a higher level of peer review of the project proposals was necessary. Essentially a team is needed for this purpose. g2boojum and christel lead that team for the last years. Some sort of page for a proposal with a place to put comments and feedback.
The following people stated that they would run the GSoC for Gentoo this year.
-antarus (since I can just walk to leslie's desk ;P)
-tsunam (one of the coordinators yes and would be willing to poke people for updates)
-jmbsvicetto (help organize things and to server as a contact for students/mentors)
2) Ways to revive user relations as we've been sorta meh for a while
3) ways to get users more involved
4) ways to get information out better
-Get involved with PR and Events coordination.
-Consider regional Gentoo Conferences.
-Increase Gentoo exposure at other conferences by holding "Birds of a Feather" or other meetings.
nichoj: I'm wanting to start announcing events gentoo will be at on the frontpage.
-Consider the implementation of a web based survey system to gather user feedback. QuantumSummers offered to assist with this, having designed & implemented a dynamic survey & analysis engine using the Django (python) web framework. Antarus offered to assist with this as well by talking to Infra (robbat2).
-Gentoo is holding a Birds of a Feather meeting at PyCon 2008, on Saturday, March 15, from 6PM to 9PM (or later).
-Considered creating a Gentoo User Interview Feature and a "Company Using Gentoo" Feature section for the GMN.
-We also discussed ways of providing development updates to the user community by means of interviews for GMN
-( antarus: 25% of projects requested a month, you only get bugged every four months)
-(mark_alec:monthly 'what project are you working on' threads on -dev)
|
Nixon: *sings* "Remeber what the doormouse said: Feed your head. I'm meeting you halfway, you stupid hippies!"(sarcasm)
Obviously, need user input on some of these items....Ideas for GSOC. I'd like to get at least half a dozen valid project idea's fleshed out that would really help out as a whole.
Another thing...anyone have any spill proof bean burrito containers. As you see...antarus needs them 
Hit me as always at tsunam at gentoo.org or I'll look here and help with idea's.
_________________
I'm not afraid of happy endings, just afraid my life wont work that way. |
|
Gentoo Chat
