Planning the Next Meeting

• The plan is March 2019, we do not want to go for a two year cadence and it is not clear whether there will be enough demand for attendance if the frequency is increased even further
• g5pw@ will organize at Mittelab in Trieste, Italy

Feedback from this Edition

What went well?

• Great organization, thanks Mojca & Aljaž. +1
• Location allowed lots of collaboration, that's great.
  • The location also forced people to be together in the evening, which is much nicer than distributing to different hotels at the end of the evening.
• More achievements this year due to lots of hacking sessions. Getting things done is great! +3
  • Ticket closing is nice!
  • Timelimits for discussions helped with that.
  • Documenting hacking results is very helpful and gives a sense of accomplishment.
• Taking notes worked much better than last time. It's nice that the notes don't rot on some etherpad™ forever but are actually pushed to the wiki right away. +3
• Non-hacking event was very nice. We should always have an afternoon for a non-IT group activity. +2
• Nice improvements to the PR bot.
• Infrastructure topics are also interesting for others, not only "established" MacPorts base and infra committers.
• Getting away from your regular duties it great to only work on MacPorts and tackle larger topics that require uninterrupted time.
• Arriving on Friday evening and starting on Saturday is great.
  • Friday - Wednesday is good.
• The last meeting was a motivation boost, and this one is no different!
• Getting GSoC students to the meeting helps with retention. +1

What could be better?

• Have a more detailed plan before the meeting – this allow others to see what we are doing and enable more remote participation. +1
  • Unfortunately, discussing what to discuss is hard. People jump into the topics right away, rather than acknowledging that we need discussion on a certain issue.
  • We did actually quite well with our local planning and time slots, but we should have wikified the whiteboard.
  • We might try having a voice/video meeting before to decide on interesting topics earlier.
• We must do meetings every year, otherwise we always use "last year" even though we didn't even have a meeting. +99
• The long hacking sessions were very productive, but not very social.
  • This may be related to the location where we had dinner right next to our hacking area.
  • The afternoon non-IT group activity is a nice balance to that.
• Don't get a location with construction outside that will cut your upstream.
  • 4G is great, and actually sufficient for a group of 8 hackers.
• Last time we tried to continue meeting via video/audio calls, but the idea didn't take off after the meeting.
  • Should we try again this time?
  • If so, don't ask whether to do it, just announce a date & time and do it
  • Topics should be clear before the call – just pick a couple of topics and take feedback at the end for new topics for the next meeting.
    • Mojca will schedule a meeting for April 21st 13:00 UTC for 1h. We should discuss two topics, 30 minutes each. She will just pick two topics as an initial meeting.
  • We should do the same with GSoC – just invite for a call to discuss our proposals.
• Some of the targets were not achieved
  • For example, we did not finish the migration branch – however, this was probably due to us underestimating the work that was needed.
• Bring Club Mate!

Experiences and Testimonials

• It's nice to meet everybody in person! +1
• Come to Helsinki, it's great!
• Play Papers, Please!
• Cooking is great!
• Indian food is great!
• "Fortunately, we had bad weather" ~g5pw
• The open air event needs to include lots of stair climbing.