community develop/contributor call

[Ian Campbell <Ian.Campbell@citrix.com>]

Hi all,

For a few years now I've been running a monthly phone call between
various organisations which contribute to Xen, the so called "TCT
Call"[0]. However since then the Xen Project has moved to the Linux
foundation and the introduction of the Advisory Board means this call
isn't really useful in its current form any more.

Rather than just cancelling it I've been thinking of repurposing it into
a more development focused call for all contributors (maintainers, patch
submitters etc).

The idea would be to provide a regular slot where technical and
development topics can be discussed on an on demand basis without the
need to setup an ad-hoc call each time something comes up. In other
words to provide a forum for topics such as thrashing out a more complex
design for a new feature, building consensus on how to move forward with
a stalled patch series, discussing difficult freeze exception requests
during release periods and cases where on list discussion has stalled or
those involved feel the need to have a "live" chat about it for some
reason.

My intention would be the call would be targeted at maintainers and
people who are themselves working on the code/design, although anyone
will be welcome to dial in and take part.

The plan would be to post a call for agenda items to xen-devel a week
beforehand with the call being cancelled the day before if no topics
were proposed (I have no problem with the call only happening
occasionally, there's no point in having it if there are no topics, but
if it's useful a couple of times a year it's worth having IMHO). I
will try and reach out to anyone who should be involved with a proposed
topic to try and ensure that the call has the right people on it in
order to make progress. In the event that some of the participants feel
that a topic is still being usefully discussed on list and that
discussion should remain there then I'll mediate to either gain
consensus one way or another or unblock things some other way etc.

I would expect people decide based on the published agenda each month
whether they want/need to attend. I hope that at least the maintainers
would make an effort to attend if there were topics covering their areas
(and as above I will chase where needed).

In the short term I intend to stick with the same time (5PM UK, on the
second Wednesday of the month) and cadence (monthly) as before, but I
might revisit the timing, in particular if we find the proposed topics
make the time problematic for key people who want to be involved (e.g.
folks in the Far East, for whom 5PM UK is pretty antisocial).

Since that schedule puts a call a week today (14th Jan), I'll send out a
call for agenda later today.

Ian.

[0] http://wiki.xen.org/wiki/Xen_Technical_Coordination_Team_%28TCT%29_Meeting