Future Feature Weekly Planning Meeting

[Michael Stone]

Greg,

Here are some comments and questions on your meeting and minutes. I hope
you find them helpful.

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

How, in your opinion, did the private setting improve the meeting?

>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

Ed mentioned concerns about the value of standing weekly meetings which
are not absolutely necessary. Who are you expecting will attend this
"Future Features" meeting? For how long do you expect it will recur?
(Also, can you define "feature" for me?)

>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). 

Then why not just call it a (software?) strategy meeting?

>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.

There was substantial push-back from people who said that we're already
swimming in feedback which has, as yet, not been acted upon.

>- 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.

I thought the key points from this discussion were as follows:

* People often propose changes; sometimes, they explain why the changes
   are desirable.

* Release contracts and release managers are believed to be helpful
   supporting devices for bringing changes to release quality in a timely
   and transparent fashion. Champions are therefore the people who
   perform or organize the work necessary to expire release contracts.
   
* We haven't yet figured out how to effectively develop and release
   changes proposed by people who are not able to personally implement
   their proposals. We want to improve our ability to handle such
   proposals because we think that they are frequently central to our
   mission.

>- 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?).

More specifically, we spoke about the fact that people who want to be
involved in setting OLPC's future direction should make plans _now_ to
attend our >=9.2 planning conference (which will be in something like
7-8 months.)

The discussion around Fudcon was simply that it would be good to take
time in January (e.g. before or after Fudcon) to take stock of our
progress toward the goals we set in November and to make any necessary
course corrections.

>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...

Well said.

Regards,

Michael

P.S. - I noticed that the desire of many of the meeting participants to
hash out policy differences during the meeting conflicted with your
understandable desire to stick to your schedule and agenda. Is there
some other venue where you would prefer to see people trying to resolve
these disagreements?