Bugzilla meetings: disappointment, disaster and chaos

[Gervase Markham]

Frédéric Buclin wrote:
> So you all remember that yesterday was a bit "special" with Mike
> Beltzner being our "special" guest. I invited him to let him share with
> us some of his experience about User Experience and what could be good
> for us to do in the near future to improve the UI of our product.

Perhaps, in hindsight, our discussions on the future goals of the
project and on the UI have not yet reached the point where inviting Mike
to the meeting was the right thing to do.

I actually think Mike's presence was pretty important, because he got us
thinking in a goal-oriented way rather than just "Hey, would it be good
to Ajax our interface a bit? What Ajaxy stuff do you think we should do,
Mike?"

> - Chaos because everybody started talking at the same time, mostly
> ignoring guest's review and interrupting him. Chaos also because
> comments appeared in the IRC channel faster than one could read.

Are you saying that you asked Mike to do a UI review of Bugzilla, and
this meeting was the time for him to present the results? If so:

a) I didn't realise that (maybe I'm alone, maybe not)
b) IRC is a really bad way to present the results of a usability review.

> - Disappointment because as being the one who invited him, I expected
> some better discussion, with less chaos and better decisions from our...
> ah yes, do we have module owners and leaderships?

Well, quite. We need to sort out our own problems first.

> http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Ambassadors/Meetings/2006-06-15?action=AttachFile&do=get&target=fedora-ambassadors-2006-06-15.txt
> 
> Pretty boring, isn't it? So what? How should we proceed? 

I think a more important initial question is: why do we have IRC
meetings? What do they give us that exchanging email on the mailing list
does not? After all, they have some obvious disadvantages with respect
to email, so if we are going to have them, we need to know what the
advantages are, and why we need those advantages.

Gerv