Members of Open Coral project have been ‘divided’ to three teams: Core Developers, Concept Designers and UX Team. Similar team formation is common in open source projects. Of course the amount and names of teams vary from case to case. In Open Coral project we try to be as open and transparent as possible regarding development. How we do that? We use commonly used tools in development and in community management. We fill our webpage with recent news and changes in teams. Wiki is used for documentation. We have open meetings every week in our IRC channel. Meeting agendas are constructed in wiki and links to meeting minutes are listed in community section. For bugs, feature requests and other issues we have established public bugtracker. So far we haven’t set up twitter or any other SOME tools. Reason is simple, all of those require attention and the amount of resources is limited. All the above is common to any open source project which operate virtually. There are projects which are not completely virtual and Open Coral is one of those.
Live IRL meetings
We have held two live meetings so far. In live meeting some of the people involved gather together in some space (IRL, not virtual) and discuss issues, plans and ideas. In Open Coral live meetings seems to be the driving force at the moment. Every time we have a live meeting, things leap forward. So far we have had two live meetings, so I can’t draw any real conclusions yet about how much live meetings might benefit us. One reason why the community wanted to have live meetings (just guessing) is that all except one developer are from Tampere. Hopefully this is not so in the future.
We are looking for developers with Ruby skills! And you don’t even have to be from Tampere, or even from Finland
We welcome all developers, UX experts, code monkeys, Javascript wizards and graphics designers.
Because we are located in same city, it is only natural to have live meetings. So far meetings have included people from all three teams. Clear benefits for having IRL meetings are:
- Things get solved much faster when we can discuss issues face to face without screens and keyboards.
- Further more, having IRL meetings offers us a tool to become familiar to each other much faster than compared for example IRC discussions.
- Ideas transfer both between people and between teams (I like ‘leaking borders”, where information diffusion occurs).
Ok, the above is nothing new. I bet all projects do the same (have IRL meetings) if at all possible. I was pleased to find out that live IRL meetings have positive impact on development and also in the spirit inside project. One thing was still bothering me: all this information, all the ideas and great thoughts will most likely stay inside the heads of live IRL meeting participants. Those members who are not able to attend live meeting are sort of left out. Same applies to all people who might be lurking around the project and might consider joining our project. As I said before, I like leaking borders or not having borders at all. However, having live IRL meetings is building a border between ‘us’ and ‘others’. That’s not good. What also happened in our meetings is that no one is making any notes. After the meeting we have nothing that would state our decisions or thoughts. Again, not good. More borders because information which is supposed to become extrovert ends up introvert (stays in the minds of meeting attendees). I started thinking about tools and methods to eliminate or at least lower the border.
Broadcast and save meeting video feeds
If not all willing are able to join our live IRL meetings, we must offer a way to participate otherwise. One option is broadcasting video feed from meetings and save those feeds for later use. I chose this approach and started doing some testing with various ready-made services. I had some requirements for the above:
- I have N900 and N950 phone – I must be able to use that to make the video feed.
- I must have ready-made ‘video feed’ app for either one of the above phones.
- I must have a free service through which the feed can be viewed with browser (with embed object).
- I must be able to save all the video feeds for later use.
- I would like that if the same service could offer me a simple feed (RSS or other) for the recorded sessions.
- All the above must be set up in less than a day, preferably within a few hours.
Solution – bambuser.com
I didn’t use much time to find all services that would satisfy all the above. Instead I remembered something that I became accustomed with about a year ago: bambuser.com. I remembered that bambuser provides at least most of the features that I needed and it also has ready-made app for both phones. After a few tests I decided to use it for broadcasting the meetings. In brief, I have embedded bambuser video feed object (flash == sucks, would prefer html5 based solution) in to http://ossoil.com/live (screen shot below).
On the same page I have list of all the previous recordings/past broadcastings. That list is RSS feed provided by bambuser.com. I have bambuser app in my N950 (borrowed from local device program). Below is one example of recorded Live IRL meetup session from Jan 23rd 2012. Obviously the live stream and recording use same embedded object.
The app is awesome and simple to use. So far I have found two pitfalls in it. Firstly, the stream quality is not too great, it makes a lot of small stops. That might be related to the internet connection I use or perhaps I should use smaller resolution in the feed. Secondly, the app stores (optional) the stream to local device. From there is can be uploaded to server after the broadcasting. Downside is that it takes ages to upload the recorded video clip, which can be hour long or even more. Again, this is not app’s fault as such. The uploaded video quality is slightly better that the stream and therefore makes sense to upload it. I just must be prepared two have a few hours to upload it after the session.
The above is simple to do, it’s not rocket science and that’s why I love it. Of course broadcasting meeting video is still pretty far from ideal situation, where all participants – people in meeting facilities and others around the country or globe – could interact easily with each other. Bambuser has chat feature included in the video feed object. That can be used as one method to interact. Another option to go could be having a voice included (shared skype connection or equivalent). Nevertheless, offering a ‘window’ to IRL meeting is better than nothing and relying to random notes that people make in the meeting. We still don’t have any ‘meeting minutes’, but we have the recorded sessions which can be used/viewed. Of course that’s not the same, because reading meeting minutes takes just a moment of precious time while even fast forwarding hour long video takes ages. Anyway, I’ll continue this social testing with broadcasting our meetings at http://ossoil.com/live. Any suggestions, ideas and thoughts regarding the above are more than welcome. Let me know how to make the setting better. Thanks!
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2012, Jarkko Moilanen. CC BY-NC-SA 3.0
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