Future Feature Weekly Planning Meeting

[Greg Smith]

Hi All,

We had an internal kick off meeting for next release planning on Wed. 
October 15.

Starting next week, this will become a public Future Features planning 
meeting every Wed at 2PM US ET on IRC channel #olpc-meeting freenode.net

I call it Future Feature planning instead of 9.1.0 and plan to move the 
web page to that name as well. The idea is that we need to layout a long 
term strategy first, then decide which parts can be executed in the 
strict 9.1.0 time frame (March, 2009 delivery). That way we can track 
work that may take longer than the span of a single release.

Very condensed minutes of yesterdays meeting are below. This is my rough 
take so any edits or additions welcome

- Mitch and others talked about the importance of starting with the 
customer, finding out what they need and hearing from them directly. How 
to get comprehensive input and to then filter it in to a set of to items 
which the most benefit for the most people.

- We talked about how to find a feature "champion" and also a programmer 
and the two may not be the same. No consensus on exactly what the 
champion will do.

- We talked about the need to lay out a strategic direction (see above) 
more than a list of 9.1 features.

- We talked about what and how to have a future features planning 
conference November 17 - 21 (see action items below for next 
communication on this).

- Jim mentioned the need to plan in person meeting more in advance and 
more than just the next one. e.g. start thinking now about one in 
January (around Fudcon?).

Action items:

AI : Greg will send an e-mail asking for call for proposals for November 
meeting (called XOcamp).

AI : Ed and Kim will talk together about support and deployment input 
and ensure that it gets included.

AI for everybody: Read and update wiki: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/9.1.0

Next meeting Wed. October 22 at 2PM US ET IRC channel #olpc-meeting on 
freenode.net

Agenda for next week:
- Take wiki, input from call for proposals and input from Kim and Ed and 
make a draft agenda for November 17 - 21 meeting.

Thanks,

Greg S

PS - Just like that, 8.2 is in the can and we start on the next one! ;-)

On a personal note, thanks a lot for the super hard work everyone on 
this list has done recently. More notes of appreciation and recognition 
will be forthcoming. For me, 8.2 was a warm up to help me gauge our 
capacity (btw its awesome!). Take a breath now if you can, the really 
exciting work is just starting...