[maemo-community] Sprint meeting & process

[From: Dave Neary]

Hi,

Andrew Flegg wrote:
> On Wed, Jun 17, 2009 at 15:21, Dave Neary<dneary at maemo.org> wrote:
>> Ah! I see what you mean. Something like a mail that gets sent a week
>> before the meeting, with "Please report status of your tasks", to which
>> everyone should reply with their tasks.
>>
>> What happens if someone doesn't reply?
> [...]
>> I just think that fundamentally the problems we have right now are not
>> so much technological as human. Part of the issue might be that there
>> are no consequences to not updating status, so it isn't a high priority.
>> But then, you can't have all stick, no carrot, you need to set the
>> incentives right.
> 
> Would it be too blunt to say that the reporting and committing to
> tasks is one of the primary roles and processes of a maemo.org paid
> contributor; and performance against these will feed into any
> mechanism by which they are judged?

If that is what happens, then it wouldn't be too blunt to say it.

But every work reporting scheme that I have ever seen which didn't work 
didn't have any feedback mechanism. And every scheme which did work, did 
have a feedback mechanism.

> We haven't formalised exactly the process by which the 6-month
> contracts would get renewed (or not); but suffice to say "having a
> job" is a pretty big carrot and "not having a job" is a pretty big
> stick, IMHO.

Well, that's all stick. "Write your TPS reports or your fired" will 
result in some very smart people writing a cron job to update their 
status at 9am every morning.

"Yesterday: Made some progress.
Today: Follow up on yesterday's work."

So, I ask again: what are the status reports for? Is it just to make 
sure people are working? To identify problems they're having? To help 
set someone's priorities if they're not working on the "right" thing, or 
not in the right way?

Cheers,
Dave.

-- 
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Email: dneary at maemo.org
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