Christophe Ochal wrote:
Thanx. I'd like see the current organisation broken into more details. How would you (we ?) do that. I mean, what would be the next step. Are you disccussing these things on IRC ?
With a group this big organising an IRC session might pose a time zone related problems, basicly the mailinglist should be more then enough to get to first base (in other words, get organised enough)
The excact same problem exist with mailing lists.
At work, we see mostly benefits from working much with people in the US, Australia and Japan. If they find a bug and report it to us before they leave in the evening, we've typically fixed it before they get back in the morning.
But if you want to have a proper debate around something, the time from you saying something and me replying can be pretty long. More than a couple of iterations then becomes impossible.
So if there is an IRC session _planned well ahead_ (we could for instance say that two times each day we discuss for half an hour, most people should then be able to make it to more than half the discussions), and someone is _responsible_ for compacting the IRC logs into general ideas (for further discussion), seemingly agreed upon strategies (to be voted over in the next session) and voting results, we should get a lot more benefit from that than just random thoughts in an email.
If the topics are flagged ahead of the sessions, people can choose to ignore things they don't have that much to say about.
I once again refer to the Mars Trilogy, it's one of the best books on ANY subject I've ever read :-P