Re: [libreoffice-marketing] thoughts on the marketing phone conferences

On Sun, 2011-07-31 at 10:46 +0200, Florian Effenberger wrote:
> Hello,

Hola,

> I'm sitting in Hof on the LibreOffice German Community weekend at the 
> moment, and yesterday, we had a discussion about the sense and nonsense 
> of conference calls.
>
> While it's no secret that I'm in favor of having regular calls, others 
> here heavily objected. They named language barriers and time zone 
> problems as stopper for people to join, and felt that those who cannot 
> join the phone conferences would be somehow excluded from decision making.

A very understandable concern.

> My experience is that it sometimes can be really helpful to discuss with 
> people on the phone and just "get work done". I can understand that 
> decision making, should it be necessary, should be done on the mailing 
> list rather than on a phone call, and that minutes and recordings should 
> be provided afterwards -- however, I do not want to totally omit these 
> calls.

Agreed and that sounds like exactly what has been said before.

> However, as the participation rate in the latest calls has been rather 
> low, and the participation in the latest poll 
> (http://www.doodle.com/pdsx39rueycptpeu) is also not that overwhelming, 
> I'd like to get some feedback from your side on what you think.
>
> Do the calls make sense? 

Continuing as they have been, no not really IMO.

> Shall we have them regularly? 

Regular voice contact is worth the effort, IMO.

> Shall we do something different?

IMO - We need to give good reason for people to take the time to
interact - which means, I think, making it so something(s) of substance
comes from the time spent. Doing that is more then just picking a
certain timezone, of course.

One small idea and one amongst the steps that would be reasonably
attained would be, a monthly correspondence (let's call it a newsletter,
and think about some email/blog hybrid delivery, perhaps) and then
schedule this monthly publication to trail the meeting by a few days. 

One of the functions of the meeting then is to allow anyone in the
community a well defined way to get community news, which may be very
local, in front of the broader community. 

I think the above idea works best in the fixed meeting schedule scheme
and that it would be important to stress the use of IRC in conjunction
with the voice call - this can be one help, I would think, for language
barriers. 

Anyway, it's one idea. So - going on with this here, in this email,
isn't the best approach - I will follow up with the idea, with some more
specificity, on the wiki, and point to it in a reply to this thread.

Thanks,

//drew


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