On cooperative work [Was: Re: newbus' ivar's limitation..]

[David Chisnall]

On 2 Aug 2012, at 05:30, Doug Barton wrote:

> I used to ask the PTB to provide *some* form of remote participation for
> even a fraction of the events at the dev summit. I don't bother asking
> anymore because year after year my requests were met with any of:
> indifference, hostility, shrugged shoulders (that's a hard problem that
> we can't solve), or embarrassment. Since if the right people around here
> want something to happen, it happens; I finally came to the conclusion
> that they didn't want remote participation to happen, so it won't.
> That's a shame.

You haven't asked for this for the Cambridge DevSummit, but others have and so we have arranged for cameras and microphones to be available for two of the sessions (the DocSummit and the ARM working group) to allow those who can not attend in person for various reasons to participate.  

I don't know how useful it will be (hopefully everything will work, but my experience with video conferencing is that it stops working as soon as you try to do something important with it), but there is certainly no active attempt to exclude people who can't attend.  

After each DevSummit, the results seem to appear on the wiki quite promptly - often during the sessions.  At BSDCan this year, two of the working groups that I attended used OpenEtherPad to take minutes, so they were available in real time for non-attendees and people outside of the room were able to add things to them.  There are usually people in the room on IRC as well, who are willing to relay things from people outside.

David