Hi Peff, On Mon, 13 Aug 2018, Jeff King wrote: > For the past several years, we've held a Git Contributor Summit as part > of the Git Merge conference. I'd like to get opinions from the community > to help plan future installments. Any feedback or opinion is welcome, > but some obvious things to think about: > > - where, when, and how often? > > Plans are shaping up to have Git Merge 2019 in Brussels right after > FOSDEM in February (like it was two years ago), with a contributor > summit attached. > > Are there people who would be more likely to attend a contributor > summit if it were held elsewhere (e.g., in North America, probably > in the Bay Area)? Are people interested in attending a separate > contributor summit not attached to the larger Git Merge (and if so, > is there any other event it might be worth connecting it with, > time-wise)? Are people interested in going to two summits in a year > (e.g., Brussels in February, and then maybe some in North America > later in the year), or is that diminishing returns? I cannot speak for "the people", but for myself: Brussels is an ideal location *for me*. I would probably be unable to physically go to a second, in-person meeting in the same year, but I would of course love to attend remotely. > - format > > For those who haven't attended before, it's basically 25-ish Git > (and associated project) developers sitting in a room for a day > chatting about the project. Topics go on a whiteboard in the > morning, and then we discuss each for 30-60 minutes. > > We could do multiple days (which might give more room for actually > working collaboratively instead of just discussing). We could do > something more formal (like actual talks). We could do something > less formal (like an all-day spaghetti buffet, where conversation > happens only between mouthfuls). The sky is the limit. Some of those > ideas may be better than others. I found the unconference-style, one day meeting to be most productive. As to more formal? I don't know... talks seem to be fun and all, but they require a lot of preparation. Something championed in our standups are "chalk talks", i.e. somebody presenting in a bit more detail what they are working on, in particular explaining the context (think: Stolee enlightening the audience about finer points of computational graph theory) *without* preparing for it specifically. That makes for fun presentations, if a bit more chaotic than a real "conference talk". This format obviously lends itself to Google Hangouts. As to multiple days: Of course it would be nice to have a kind of a "hack day", but I wonder how productive this would be in the context of Git, where interests very so widely. Rather than have a "hack day", I would actually prefer to work with other contributors in a way that we have not done before, but which I had the pleasure of "test ballooning" with Pratik: using Visual Studio Code Live Share. This allows multiple users to work on the same code base, in the same worktree, seeing what each other is doing. It requires a separate communication channel to talk; Pratik & I used IRC, but I think Google Hangout (or Skype or WhatsApp or <insert-your-favorite-chat-here>) would have worked a bit better. It's kind of pair programming, but with some of the limitations removed. I guess I went off on a tangent here... Ciao, Dscho
