[Oslc-communications] Communication channels, etc. - Was: Re: Minutes from first meeting of OSLC communications workgroup, 15 Sept 2011

[Olivier Berger]

Hi.

First, apologies for not attending the meeting... and see bellow why.

Let's just, if you pardon me, focus for a moment on internal
communication, unless it's totally out of topic. And in this case,
discard the rest of this post.


Generally, I find it very hard to imagine an open community can be
sustainable if requiring that parts of its communication happens on the
phone in conf calls.

I know it's probably necessary to bootstrap some groups, or to discuss
things where written communication is not agile enough to allow
fruitfull branstorming effects, etc.

But, most of the times I'd imagine that a lot can be done through
electronic communication means like chat rooms, mail, wikis, etc.

OK, that may not be the way it happens in companies, but it works quite
well in many open source communities for instance, or standardisation
bodies.

I'll not mention the need to face to face physical encounters, as that's
enough lecturing, if you  start to get my point.

Why is that :
- timezones
- accents and level of mastery of english
- asychronous collaboration when no need to block everyone's agenda at
the same time allows to work in trains, planes, @home when baby asleep,
etc.


So I, for instance, just happen to live near Paris, France, and don't
feel so much comfortable with expressing myself on the phone among
american (or other english speaking natives) people. And I sometimes am
having dinner, or going to fetch kids at school, when it's meeting time
US east coast ;)

Nevertheless, I happend to contribute (not a lot, but still) to OSLC.

Think about people like me, their potential to contribute, disseminate,
convince...

Of course, that matters for internal discussions in OSLC.

But it the goal is to attract contributors, then you shall not cut
yourself from 4/5th of the world ;-).

OK, I agree that most commercial software houses live in the US, and
have staff barely sustaining conf-calls in english, but still.


Now, that said, I'd be pleased to read from your minutes still, and I
guess there's no more need to rant on phone communicaton.


Now, for a more constructive contribution :
http://incubator.apache.org/guides/community.html

But, if it's more about "marketing" (though I saw the discussion around
that term) of solutions vs attracting contributors/participants, then
this may not apply so well.

Happy promotion of OSLC.

Best regards,

P.S.: my own little contribution to OSLC promotion can be traced here in
most part : http://www-public.it-sudparis.eu/~berger_o/weblog/tag/oslc/

Le vendredi 16 septembre 2011 à 11:31 +0100, Andy Gurd a écrit :
> The minutes from the 15 Sept meeting of the OSLC communications
> workgroup can be found here:
> http://open-services.net/bin/view/Main/OslcCommsMtg15Sep2011 
> 
> For those that attended, thank you very much for your participation.
> Please could you review and let me know (or make your own amendments)
> if you would like anything changed. 
> 
> Regards
> 
> Andy
> 

-- 
Olivier BERGER <olivier.berger at it-sudparis.eu>
http://www-public.it-sudparis.eu/~berger_o/ - OpenPGP-Id: 2048R/5819D7E8
Ingénieur Recherche - Dept INF
Institut TELECOM, SudParis (http://www.it-sudparis.eu/), Evry (France)