[IPython-dev] IPython "lab meetings" on g+ hangouts on air

[Fernando Perez]

Hi folks,

as Brian just mentioned, we had a google hangout discussion today,
that arose impromptu from having a chat room discussion where it was
obvious we needed more bandwidth than just typing can provide.

Today (perhaps because of all the changes Google made yesterday, who
knows), g+ was a bit glitchy, and we were unable to make the hangout
on-air, so it ended up not being recorded.  But in general we want all
these discussions to be public, for example here's our previous one:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yb35M8cW7o4

While I think it's great to jump in on video conversations like this
as-needed from the dev room or a github issue/PR discussion, we've
also been thinking about having a more regular 'lab meeting' style
discussion that is scheduled at a fixed time.

This would give a predictable time for everyone to participate, and
would play the same role as lab meetings in everyday research, but
taking into consideration the fact that we're an open, international
collaboration.

Those lab meetings would be held with hangouts on-air, and thus open
for anyone who wants to watch and join, and kept on-record afterwards.

The plan would be to hold them for ~60-90 minutes, to make regular
progress on design decisions that impact the project at large.
Impromptu hangouts as required by the everyday workflow will continue
to happen, and we'll do our best to also record those in public
format.

If you like the idea, I'd like to propose Thursdays at 10am US Pacific
time, i.e. UTC-7 hours right now (PDT).  That's a good time for all
the folks here in California while still being reasonable in Europe.
I know we can't find a time that will work across all of Earth, but at
least that probably covers reasonably well our current core team and
lots of others.

How does this sound to you all?  Would the time work for a reasonable
chunk of our active developers? Note that I am NOT asking only of the
'core' github committers, but of anyone who is putting lots of time
into IPython work and is interested in joining these discussions.

Cheers,

f