[eclipse.org-architecture-council] Boston Council meetings agenda - plea

[Bjorn Freeman-Benson <bjorn.freeman-benson@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Council Members,
The Requirements, Architecture, and Planning Councils will be meeting in 
Boston August 23, 24, and 25. We will be meeting at the Hotel Marlow. 
You will need to make your own reservations, and you need to do so soon.

Hotel Marlow
25 Edwin H. Land Boulevard
Cambridge, MA 02141
617 395 2539

Phone: 1 800 825 7040 for reservations block under “*Eclipse Council 
Meeting Room Block*” = rate $179.00

The first ACTION ITEM is to make your hotel reservations before the 
block expires.

The second ACTION ITEM is to let Sharon (sharon@xxxxxxxxxxx) know that 
you are attending so that she can order enough food - we don't want to 
run out like we did last quarter. Hungry people don't make good meeting 
attendees :-)

The IMPORTANT QUESTION is about the schedule. For various reasons, it 
would be convenient to rearrange the schedule a little from our last 
meetings. Hence I propose this time layout. Please let me know if this 
will not work for you - if there is sufficient resistance (i.e., more 
resistance to this layout than to the previous one), we will switch 
back. Either way, I will confirm by Monday so that you can make flight 
arrangements, etc.

New proposed times:

Tuesday all day - Requirements Council
Tuesday all day - Planning Council
Wednesday morning - plenary with all three councils
Wednesday afternoon - Architecture Council 1/2
Thursday morning - Architecture Council 2/2

I am not planning to have call-in numbers for these face-to-face 
meetings because mixed f2f and conf.call meetings tend to have lower 
productivity than either mode by itself.

------------------------------------------------------------
*Requirements Council*
>> Tuesday, August 24, 8:30am - 5pm
Mike Milinkovich is chairing this council and will be sending the agenda 
separately.
A working lunch will be provided.

>> Tuesday, August 24, evening
A group dinner will be arranged by Sharon Wolfe.

>> Wednesday, August 25, 8:30am - noon
Plenary session with all three councils. The purpose of this session is 
for the Strategic Consumers and the Requirements Council as a while to 
provide input directly to the Architecture and Planning Councils.
A working lunch will be provided.


------------------------------------------------------------
*Architecture Council*
>> Tuesday, August 24, evening
A group dinner will be arranged by Sharon Wolfe.

>> Wednesday, August 25, 8:30am - noon
Plenary session with all three councils. The purpose of this session is 
for the Strategic Consumers and the Requirements Council as a while to 
provide input directly to the Architecture and Planning Councils.
A working lunch will be provided.

>> Wednesday, August 25, noon - 5pm
The first half of the Architecture Council meeting.

>> Thursday, August 26, 8:30am - noon
The second half of the Architecture Council meeting.

Agenda items left over from the last meeting:
* Project Boundaries and Council Role in Coordination. How can the
Architecture Council help the technical progress of Eclipse
without creating an overly large bureaucracy? We're an open source
organization, so in some circles that means "no control", but in
fact we're an organization with a deliberate process whose purpose
is to create high-quality frameworks. How does the Architecture
Council help with that?

* Monthly Conference Calls. How can we use these calls effectively?
What issues are useful for discussion? What is a good schedule?
What issues should we expect the Projects to bring the Architecture
Council? We have not had monthly conference calls and I have not
received any demands for them, but there is a vague sense that
if we had more coordination between projects, that would be good.

New agenda items:
* Quality. Continuing our quality discussion starting with a
discussion of the draft Guidelines and the feedback received from
the community about these Guidelines. The draft Guidelines are:
http://www.eclipse.org/org/processes/Guidelines_for_Eclipse_Development_Process/

* Roadmap. The days are growing shorter and autumn will be upon us
in no time at all, and with autumn comes the Eclipse Roadmap
process. The Roadmap version 1 had a fairly lame architecture
summary of Eclipse - we'd like to do better in Roadmap version 2.
What would we like to see? And how can we make that happen?


------------------------------------------------------------
*Planning Council*
>> Tuesday, August 24, 8:30am - 5pm
A working lunch will be provided.

* Synchronized Release Train. Kevin Haaland will describe the mechanics of
what projects who are opting-in to the Release Train will be opting-in
to. The projects will, at this meeting, opt-in or opt-out.

* Status Reporting Format. I will distribute the proposed XML status
reporting file format. We will discuss and then agree to something
like it, and we will agree to a time line for placing our projects'
information in this file format.

* Roadmap. The days are growing shorter and autumn will be upon us
in no time at all, and with autumn comes the Eclipse Roadmap
process. The Roadmap version 1 was a real effort to put together.
My theory is that the XML status report format will auto-gen the
Planning Council parts of the Roadmap, but we should make sure
we believe that before we leave Boston.

* Website Content, Part 1. A check on whether we accomplished our website
updates that we agreed to do last meeting; either update old information
or remove it.

* Website Content, Part 2. The Committer Get-Together in Beaverton last week
resulted in a suggestion that all project websites have four standard
links with standard icons and standard locations. This way anybody can
find out common information about a project by going to its website and
following one of those links. We should decide what those four (or
two or three or five) links are, and we should all agree to put them
on our sites. Suggestions include: the current plan, the PMC/project
leadership minutes, project phase, ... ?

* Quality. Continuing our quality discussion starting with a
discussion of the draft Guidelines and the feedback received from
the community about these Guidelines. The draft Guidelines are:
http://www.eclipse.org/org/processes/Guidelines_for_Eclipse_Development_Process/

* Project Log. As part quality discussion and part of the Guidelines and
part of the IP Policy that we all signed on to follow, each project
should be keeping a Project Log. We will go over what needs to be in
that log and how important it is and the time line that the Foundation
needs the current copies of the Log.

>> Tuesday, August 24, evening
A group dinner will be arranged by Sharon Wolfe.

>> Wednesday, August 25, 8:30am - noon
Plenary session with all three councils. The purpose of this session is 
for the Strategic Consumers and the Requirements Council as a while to 
provide input directly to the Architecture and Planning Councils.
A working lunch will be provided.


------------------------------------------------------------
I repeat what I said last quarter: "Eclipse is at yet another 
interesting point in its evolution: success has bred rapid growth. It is 
our challenge to manage this growth while maintaining the productivity, 
innovative frameworks, and high quality bar that have made Eclipse 
great." We're making progress, but we need to keep making progress.

------------------------------------------------------------
ACTION ITEM ONE: make hotel reservations.

ACTION ITEM TWO: tell Sharon that you are going to be eating food.

IMPORTANT QUESTION: is this new/revised schedule acceptable to you? (Or, 
more specifically, if this is not acceptable, please let me know.)

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