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Subject: RE: [wsbpel] This telcon process doesn't work!
Folks, My initial reaction to today's kickoff:
We ran into some issues (some business but mostly protocol, I think), but to me, these seem like mostly normal issues for the birth-pains of a new group with this kind of mission and industry interest. The benefit to running into these kinds of issues in our kickoff meeting is that we can solidify some ground rules and practices early in our life that will help things go more smoothly the rest of the way, before we get to the really gnarly issues. BTW, thanks to all who spearheaded, attended, and supported this, but especially to Diane and John for their patient leadership.
Some points of order that I might offer:
A few folks complained about having a conference call meeting conducted mostly in "listen-only" mode and needing to resort to speaker queues. I presume they felt that this somehow would constrain or limit (negatively) the opportunities for contribution and/or interaction.
In fact, if we were to strictly follow Robert's Rules of Order, these constraints would be barely noticed by anyone participating (with maybe a minor exception, see my suggested revisions below). [In fact, following Robert's Rules on a conf call with speaker-queuing is better than following Robert's Rules in person in at least one way: the fairness of the queuing is managed for us by the call system; when in person, the sequence of hand-raising is somewhat subject to the memory of the chair.]
John, I think you mentioned getting a FAQ for Robert's Rules posted to the BPEL site - this is crucial, and everyone needs to get some basic familiarity with operating in a group bound by Robert's Rules. They are intended (and crafted over many years) to help ensure fair and orderly conduct of decision making by groups.
To be clear, for BPEL conf call TC meetings, I am strongly in favor of conducting them roughly as was proposed for today's call, with listen-mode most of the time (to minimize line noise), plus the following guidelines: - allow folks to get in the speaker queue at any time (this is simply analogous to raising your hand to be heard at an in-person meeting) - ask that the meeting chair simply call on those in the queue in a FIFO manner, as appropriate to the point at hand - note that getting into the queue doesn't mean you can speak at will; you will get your turn as called upon by the chair - again, participants should think of getting in the speaker queue simply as equivalent to raising your hand. If you 'drop your hand' then re-raise it, you first fall out of the queue and then get back on at the end of the queue. This is fair. - until we get the hang of it, we maybe need to be a bit more heavy-handed on enforcing some of the rules of order, e.g., when the item on the floor is whether or not you object to the current motion, do not use your moment on the floor to suggest another amendment - that only creates confusion. There are certain times open for amendments, etc. Read Robert's Rules to get some understanding of how this works.
(A geeky thought: Robert's Rules represents a set of very structured rules for conducting a certain kind of conversation - we should consider it as a use case - express Robert's Rules in BPEL! ;)
Later, after we get some familiarity and trust with each other, I suspect we can feel comfortable relaxing some aspects of Robert's Rules, and can segue into a little less formality. But to start, I strongly recommend that we follow the book very strictly; this lays the ground rules up front and no one will feel they are being treated unfairly in any way.
If I had any thought of not attending the face-to-face, those have been erased. I think that meeting in first-person and getting a chance to know each other will do wonders for improving our rapport and hopefully comfort with each other, and we can become efficient at making our way through the work that lies ahead.
Looking forward, Rand
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It was tough, wasn't it and the polling (or rather the handraising - polling itself should be doable in this manner) mechanism was frustrating indeed. If the TC and the chairs feel such a large group is too large to manage without a "Coordinator" (100 is a lot although I have seen it managed), we really should look at moving to subgroups focusing on specific topics - eg charter, legal, technical (the reason for the TC don't forget), etc - pretty quickly where the issues can be hashed out in detail. F2F's probably don't happen frequently enough to deal with all the issues that require unobstructed free form interaction.
Just my .02.
BB
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