2009/8/4 Robert Leverington
<address@hidden>
I would like to propose having regular IRC meetings (e.g. two to three
times a month). This would involve specifying a time (probably in the
evening) on one weekday, and everyone interested congregating in the
channel. There would be a specified agenda and we would go through the
points and discuss them. Minutes would then be produced by one of the
members and the decisions made actioned.
The rationale for this is that currently discussions can take several
weeks to actually come to a consensus, this is frustrating and wastes
time. IRC meetings would result in all points being completely
discussed withing two to three hours. IRC meetings have proven to work
with many other organisations including freenode and Wikimedia.
Real life meetings are nice, but obviously can't happen as often as IRC
ones can and also exclude people not in proximity to the location
(especially when talking about things that affect the whole of DFEY
rather than just individual branches).
i can see the benefits of having IRC discussions but what you're suggesting would take ludicrous amounts of time to undertake; I personally am not going to sit in an IRC channel for 2-3 hours 2 or 3 times a month following the complete detail of the discussion and i don't believe many other people would actually be happy with this. I don't believe there's actually enough to discuss to warrent such frequent and lengthy 'meetings'.
Another point I'd like to mention is that Wikimedia and Freenode are organisations which have real structure and have gravitas such that petty squabbles won't take place. DFEY is -to be brutally honest- a bit of a shouting match sometimes on IRC and I can see it becoming a real problem in a discussion such as this. IRC gives the opportunity to shout at eachother and DFEY as an organisation is nothinglike Wikimedia and has nothing nearly so important worth discussing at the moment.