[gentoo-dev] Gentoo Hangouts

[Pavlos Ratis]

Hello all,

Everyday we talk to each other about different kind of things related
to Gentoo. IRC and MLs are the primary way of our communication, but
this is only a text-based communication. I think sometimes it would be
better to escape from that.

That's why I'd like to propose Gentoo Hangouts. Gentoo Hangouts will
be Google+  video Hangouts(video calls) held by teams or developers
independent of a team. The main goal is to have the teams introduce
themselves and discuss about different issues in their Gentoo-related
projects.

It's a very interactive way of communication and it helps team bonding. The
first Hangout of a team would be good to include a short introduction of the
team (what,who,where). Also team members will introduce themselves.
Then team should start talking about how a user can contribute and
what is going on in the team. Tips and tricks would be a plus and very
useful to users. Finally, users will be able to ask
questions at G+ and then team members will try to answer the most of
these questions.

Future team meetings could be also held via video hangouts or interviews like
dabbot's doing in his personal blog. In addition, developers
independent of the team could organize a hangout along with other
developers to discuss different topics or to have a
Gentoo-related chit-chat. Users could also participate into this video calls.

It's very easy to decide the host of the talk. Maybe the team leads
would be proper
for that or someone from the PR. One of the major issues is the
difference in timezone and the workload of each developer. However, I
think it would be great to find 1 hour to
participate. Teams could use a site like http://doodle.com to organize
the Hangout and find an hour that fit to their schedule.

Except from a camera and a microphone requirement is a Google account and
www-client/google-talkplugin package which is already in the tree.

It would be great to have teams introduce themselves and inform users in a
more interactive way how to contribute and answer their questions. Finally as
I said different other topics could be covered in this calls.

All these video calls will be archived to a public Gentoo account in Youtube.

I am looking forward to your feedback, your comments and of course for the
first team that will create a video Hangout!! :)

That's all folks, thanks for your time.

Pavlos