Re: [Tails-project] New time for Tails contributors meetings…

Hi,

Historical perspective: we switched to "every Nth of the month"
because it was impossible to find a fixed day in the week that didn't
prevent at least one of us from *ever* attending. Back then, it seemed
clear that preventing some of us from attending 3/7 of the time was
better than excluding some of us every time.

I don't know how much the raw data on which we based this analysis has
changed. I suspect that 1. with more contributors, the "$day doesn't
work for me" blockers have only become more common; and 2. with more
people doing Tails as their job, "I can't do week-ends" is likely to
be more common as well.

At first glance, the "avoid week-end" idea raises the following
question to my mind: "optimizing for people who have Tails as their
main activity and want the evenings and week-end off" vs. "optimizing
for people who have another primary activity and have time available
for Tails outside of office hours". IMO the first group already
occupies lots more space (sometimes thanks to paid work time) to
express their desires, needs and opinions on our various communication
channels (e.g. Redmine and mailing lists). So I'm very much tempted to
optimize for the second group.

OTOH what I'm writing here is somewhat simplistic: even people who
have other primary activities may wish to save the week-end for things
happening away from the computer. I guess the only way to know what's
the state of things within our current team would be to conduct some
kind of survey. But it won't help us optimize for people who are *not*
on our team yet (which is critical for inclusion purposes).

IMO that's one of those problems that seems simple at first glance,
but that's very hard in practice, so perhaps we should check how other
projects handle it.

To end with, we didn't start looking into timezones here. In this area
as well, popular vote is likely to produce a snowball effect that
works towards reproducing the current demographics of our community.
I don't know if we're ready to tackle this problem yet.

Cheers!
--
intrigeri