On Fri, Jul 21, 2017 at 01:17:25PM +0200, Michael Richardson wrote: > > Can you explain "time boxes" here? "Time box" is the (admittedly inelegant) jargon that proponents of certain agile software development methodologies use to describe a period in which active development + other stuff happens. This is sometimes called the "sprint", but it's not only that of course since that's usually coding and such like. The whole group does all the stuff it does for a period inside the "time box". This is often a period of two or three weeks, though I've seen groups that do as much as six. The idea is that, within the period in question, a group focusses only on certain things and everything else is set aside. Setting the jargon aside for a moment, the point is that instead of having a WG interim in which everyone has to interrupt their circadian rhythm, the WG instead decides that (say) the WG is going to hammer out the issues on $draft between (say) Tues and Thurs of next week. The jabber room is open and active and issues are rapidly taken up from the tracker and knocked down, and then an interim consensus call can be done on (say) Friday. There could also be some sort of voice channel up and available, I suppose, if people wanted to join it _ad hoc_ to sort something out. It's more async and therefore there'll be more mail and jabber back and forth, and maybe someone will come to the discussion later and be annoyed that his or her deathless prose was mangled, but it's still a way of working rapidly but async in keeping with the geographic distribution. I have seen free software projects have success with this sort of thing, so it is possible to do it, though it requires that all participants rely really a lot on the principle of charity and are super polite and nice in their emails. So it might not work here. But it might be worth a go to see whether it could produce results. Best regards, A -- Andrew Sullivan ajs@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx