choldgraf
commented
5 years ago sorry that this was on relatively short notice - they are finalizing the schedule for this meeting just in the final weeks beforehand. To be clear, this is not a high-stakes talk, we're just giving 4 minute updates from each project across a wide range of projects. My plan right now is to look at the roadmap for repo2docker as well as recent conversations in the issues and come up with a few bullet-points from that.
My notes on release cycles etc were more of a similar to reaction to what Tim describes above - we should be able to quickly answer the questions "what have we done recently, and where do we think we're going next" pretty much any time. I don't think we need to figure that out before these updates next week, again they are pretty informal.
As a comment on #200 I would like to raise that a few days notice is very short and realistically we (as a team) won't be able to come up with an answer. This means that in the talk the only items about the future should be "Not speaking for the project, I plan to work on ..." avoiding to speak for the team as a whole. This is based on my understanding that you can only speak for the team after consulting with it, finding common ideas, building consensus and then having that part of your talk "dictated" to you by the team. As a fully remote, distributed team of volunteers we need more time to communicate than a in person team of full timers. Especially because we are volunteers we should give a high priority to getting input from everyone involved (and everyone on the team should give input in a timely manner) so that people can influence where the project is going.
While Chris has probably known about this talk for more than a few days* I think the problem of "what is the future" comes up frequently enough at short notice that I think we should have a "ready to go" answer written down. Spending a few minutes each thinking about what areas of work currently interests you and writing them down as bullet points is worth it. It will also help us in the team to know who to work with because we want to see similar things done.
We could then compile the bullet points into something that becomes part of https://jupyterhub-team-compass.readthedocs.io/en/latest/talking.html or link to the thread from that page.
Doing this will divide up the (very) hard task of figuring out the plans for the future and then being on the hook for delivering them (this shouldn't be a task put upon the person giving the next talk).
To close on a positive note: I think we pull off some incredibly good work that much larger teams with more resources would feel proud of. We have been able to do this because we are a group of dedicated, talented, and special (not in that sense...) people that form a team that is unique. A lot of what we do and achieve is contrary to what conventional wisdom says is possible. We have our own special way of getting stuff done. Does the success we have had justify ignoring conventional wisdom of planning and project management? I don't know, but we must be doing some things right so maybe we should be confident in pushing back against "normal people's" desire for plans and order and well define chains of command :-/