[discussion] Start alternating our monthly meeting times

[choldgraf]

Context

We currently run our monthly team meetings at 11pm EUR / 2pm CAL / 7am AUS time. This makes it somewhat doable for our distributed team, though it is at an inconvenient time on EUR time zones. In addition, now that I'm on a EUR time zone myself, I cannot attend this meeting anymore at its current time. Unfortunately, there is no meeting time that will be near working hours for all possible time zones.

This is a fundamental challenge of running a distributed team, and it will become more challenging as we grow the contributors and maintainers to the EBP projects. There are a few strategies that I've seen communities take to improve this:

1. Just pick a time and one timezone is regularly inconvenienced. That's what we are kind-of doing now with our current meeting.
2. Alternate time-zones each month. This is what the JupyterHub team meeting does. It alternative between 8AM CAL / 5pm EUR and 1AM CAL / 10AM EUR each month. The assumption is that team members from CAL / AUS time zones will attend every other meeting.
3. Go totally asynchronous. Finally some communities just give up on synchronous meetings and conduct all of their business via asynchronous issues and updates. For example, with a monthly "what have you been up to, and what would you like to discuss" issue.

Proposal

I'd propose that we go with option 2. Given that we have maintainers of EBP projects that are already split between Americas/Europe/Australia, I think we should shoot for accommodating a global community of maintainers over favoring a subset of timezones forever. Moreover, I think that there is value in having face-to-face time, and so suggest we stick with monthly meetings instead of doing things purely async.

I will semi-arbitrarily suggest that we start using the same meeting times as JupyterHub does, and stick with the "first Wednesday of each month" approach for the day. So for example, the next 4 meetings after this would be:

• Wednesday, June 1st at 5pm EUR
• Wednesday, July 6th at 10am EUR
• Wednesday, Aug 3rd at 5pm EUR
• Wednesday, Sep 7th at 10am EUR

New video room

I think it's a good idea to move away from my personal Zoom room, because in general we want fewer bottlenecks on our infrastructure. I've created a meet.jit.si room that we can use for free here:

https://meet.jit.si/ebp-team-meeting

The JupyterHub team has been using Jitsi lately and it has worked pretty well, let's give it a shot and see if this is a way to prevent me from being a bottleneck on meetings?

Are we meeting on Wed May 4/Thur May 5?

I suggest that whoever wishes can attend this meeting, though I will not be there. If there is a meeting, please take some light notes about whatever is discussed so that they can be shared with others.

For our next meeting, we should go with whatever schedule we decide on here.

[mmcky]

@choldgraf I think that alternating meeting idea seems sound, so long as the central coordinating timezone is happy. I think "face-to-face" is really useful -- not only for making decisions -- but it is nice to catch up with everyone too.