Hi folks,
On 12.05.22 11:04, Anastasia Klimchuk wrote:
The thread has been active for two months, and various people joined the discussion. People either supported the idea of the "flashrom reviewers" group, or did not comment / did not object. After two months, the topic was raised and discussed at the dev meeting (May 5). "flashrom reviewers" group was approved by all attendees. We made a decision to create this group, and documented the decision (see Meeting notes, Decision summary at 5th May 2022 https://docs.google.com/document/d/18qKvEbfPszjsJJGJhwi8kRVDUG3GZkADzQSH6WFs... ). Just to be clear, Nico was present at the meeting on 5th May.
Few hours after the meeting (that was still 5th May), we sent an email with meeting notes, https://mail.coreboot.org/hyperkitty/list/flashrom@flashrom.org/thread/VGTQI... Email contains meeting notes in full, and if someone is busy and has no time to read notes in full, there is "Decision Summary" at the top.
there were two misunderstandings on my end, both not clear from the notes either. 1. It says "we want a [...] group". To me that says, nobody would waste time if they start planing, making arrangements in that direction. But it doesn't say we are going to make it right now without further planing (to me). 2. I didn't expect that we'd be making final decisions for the project during that meeting. When we say "we want ...", "we decide ..." I assume we decide that for the attendees and non-attendees can still have a word.
Whatever, misunderstandings happen, so I just told myself it will work out anyway. To avoid friction with non-attendees, I suggested to announce it more visibly.
Great thing is that now flashrom has a place where core devs and active members of the community can make decisions: we have a meeting!
tl;dr Doesn't work for me. I'm not a native English speaker and spend most of the time of these meeting concentrating on the language.
I feared people could use the meeting to force decisions at some point. But hoped we could find some balance, a good compromise. I guess it's like the saying, give them an inch and they'll take an ell.
Here's how things look like when we don't compromise:
* I'll not take part in any verbal decision making not in my native language (German). * I'll not accept any decisions when the topic wasn't brought up at least one week in advance with maximum visibility via an unalterable medium (e.g. this mailing list on a thread per topic). * I'll not attend meetings unless the scope of those is clear and we can agree on the scope. For instance, can the meeting make decisions on behalf of the project? * I'll not use meeting infrastructure of companies who's business model is focused on building profiles of people.
Mailing list and IRC channel have been here since forever, they are good for discussions but don’t work for making decisions.
Please, elaborate on this.
A project needs a place where decisions can be made.
And one more thing, I noticed there are some incorrect statements on this thread. I am sure this was not intentional, very likely just emotional, but still I want things to be very very clear.
That change[1] is mostly unrelated to what was discussed
This is not true. The patch https://review.coreboot.org/c/flashrom/+/64101 is modifying gerrit config and adding "flashrom reviewers" group, which is exactly what was discussed. However, the patch is doing two things in one, so I added a comment and asked if it is technically possible to split.
"2 files changed, 7 insertions(+), 23 deletions(-)"
2 of the added lines were about the new group. One changed line was partially about the new group. The rest seemed unrelated.
IIRC, we decided (first meeting?) to keep using the mailing list for decisions
This is not true. Decisions summary for the first meeting has one item: "Will make this meeting bi-weekly until we've worked our way through the issues listed here." I checked the decision summary for all the meetings we had to that time, none of them said we "keep using the mailing list for decisions".
Yeah, decided was the wrong word there. I guess I brought it up. But can't really prove nor remember anything.
the attendees <...> is a kind of a random selection of people
This is not true. The attendees of the meeting are active members of the flashrom community, who are deeply interested to discuss and solve current issues and improve the project. People who invest a lot of their time into flashrom project. This one, I am actually not sure whether it is an incorrect statement or an insult. Again, most likely unintentional… but it would be great to have some kind of “sorry”.
Right, I had the flashrom context in mind, i.e. s/people/people involved with flashrom/. If that offended anyone, sorry. So it's a random subset of the people involved with flashrom. Well, that's what I wanted to say but that's not correct either. It's not a true random selection. It's biased, of course. Based on people's experience with the meeting (i.e. what is usually discussed and if that's worth their time), the date/time of course, how well they speak the language, if they are paid for it etc.
Nico