{"id":6666,"date":"2014-12-03T23:46:33","date_gmt":"2014-12-04T05:46:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.openstack.org\/blog\/?p=6666"},"modified":"2014-12-03T23:46:33","modified_gmt":"2014-12-04T05:46:33","slug":"studying-midcycle-sprints-and-meetings","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.openstack.org\/blog\/studying-midcycle-sprints-and-meetings\/","title":{"rendered":"Studying Midcycle Sprints and Meetings"},"content":{"rendered":"<p class=\"lead\">Hard to believe that we gathered in Paris just a month ago for the Design Summit. I&#8217;m still snacking on the chocolate and cheese from that fine place.<\/p>\n<p>Since the Summit we&#8217;ve had questions and posts about midcycle meeting planning, so I started gathering information from the various teams and we discussed at a recent cross-project meeting. Here are the findings about patterns, guidelines, and pitfalls for midcycle meetings. I&#8217;ve posted these to the <a href=\"https:\/\/wiki.openstack.org\/wiki\/Sprints\/Guidelines\">OpenStack wiki<\/a> also so we can continue to evolve and refine as our teams self-organize.<\/p>\n<p>Patterns we&#8217;re seeing for current midcycle meetings:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>About 10-30 people attend.<\/li>\n<li>Feedback by attendees is positive; midcycle meetings are generally considered productive events.<\/li>\n<li>Only a handful of groups tend to hold them; for this cycle we&#8217;re seeing some teams choose not to. Often subteams form around a specific tasks to complete.<\/li>\n<li>Meeting space is donated by companies, so often location is based on available free spaces and dates are then partial to the location availability.<\/li>\n<li>Travel costs are the responsibility of the individual attending (their employer most likely).<\/li>\n<li>Sometimes companies will host meals (not often).<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Guidelines we want teams to stick to:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Highest return on investment is in early days of joining or forming the team, when social bonds and trust need to be established.<\/li>\n<li>Best quality meetings tend to be sprint-oriented with real work getting done and a specific outcome in mind; hence the mid-cycle sprint name.<\/li>\n<li>Organization responsibility lands on PTL or a designated delegate.<\/li>\n<li>Multiple sprints can be co-hosted. However, productivity also lies in the small, quiet environment, and social bonding is easier in smaller groups.<\/li>\n<li>Unless there are good cross-pollination opportunities between co-hosted teams, teams should favor separate sprints.<\/li>\n<li>The Design Summit should be the first choice for gathering the whole team for decisions and roadmap alignment.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Known risks to be aware of:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Pitfall can be a feeling of &#8220;required&#8221; attendance (social or actual) causing hard feelings; also some types of contributors will be marginalized despite best efforts, such as those without a corporate sponsor, family caretakers, and people who need Visas to travel.<\/li>\n<li>Often there&#8217;s a choice implied in choosing what an individual travels to; adding a midcycle sprint means a choice has to be made.<\/li>\n<li>Virtual aspects of a midcycle require additional support such as open source tooling, or if using non-open source tooling, you must get agreement from participants.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>From my own experience, the docs team had a boot camp over a year ago where we had a great time focusing on our team, but since then we haven&#8217;t needed to meet separately from the Design Summit. Here&#8217;s Michael Still giving his &#8220;I love you&#8221; sign at our docs team meetup.<br \/>\n<img src=\"https:\/\/lh5.googleusercontent.com\/-Azro7p2ypA8\/UjITPKNsunI\/AAAAAAAAltQ\/dGz0CGBw5Eg\/w1844-h1230-no\/IMG_0982.JPG\" alt=\"Doc boot camp\" \/><\/p>\n<p>If you have any questions about midcycle sprints, please ask Stefano Maffulli. To get a list of upcoming sprints, both in person and virtual, go to the <a href=\"http:\/\/wiki.openstack.org\/wiki\/Sprints\">Sprints<\/a> wiki page.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Hard to believe that we gathered in Paris just a month ago for the Design Summit. I&#8217;m still snacking on the chocolate and cheese from that fine place. Since the Summit we&#8217;ve had questions and posts about midcycle meeting planning, so I started gathering information from the various teams and we discussed at a recent&#8230;  <a href=\"https:\/\/www.openstack.org\/blog\/studying-midcycle-sprints-and-meetings\/\" class=\"more-link\" title=\"Read Studying Midcycle Sprints and Meetings\">Read more &raquo;<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[3,21],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.openstack.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6666"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.openstack.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.openstack.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.openstack.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.openstack.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6666"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/www.openstack.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6666\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6673,"href":"https:\/\/www.openstack.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6666\/revisions\/6673"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.openstack.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6666"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.openstack.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6666"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.openstack.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6666"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}