[arch-dev-public] Next Developer Meeting

[Aaron Griffin]

On 5/9/07, Roman Kyrylych <roman.kyrylych at gmail.com> wrote:
> 2007/5/9, Alexander Baldeck <kth5 at archlinuxppc.org>:
> > Jason Chu wrote:
> > > That works well for the english speaking developers.  The non-native
> > > speakers already have enough trouble keeping up on irc, I'm pretty sure a
> > > live chat would be even more difficult for them.
> > >
> > > Jason
> > >
> >
> > I would love to do this though. From my experience having actually
> > talked to people makes a huge difference in a good way. Linuxtag helped
> > me - and I would expect all the others as well - to understand text only
> >   communication from people better as in judging what kind of mood
> > they're in. This I think is a rather big problem we have, mails that
> > sound like ranting may not be a rant at all, right?
> >
> > +1 from me for the voip chat
> >
> > Any other solutions than teamspeak though?
>
> I agree that voice communication is much better.

I've thought about this often, and flip-flopped on it.  I think Roman
covers a few of the issues... the main one being this:
My english is probably hard for non-fluent german's to understand, and
vice versa.  Hell, I'd probably have a hard time listening to iphitus.
 You ever see the movie "Snatch"... that's all english and I can't
understand half of it. 8)

> Here are few issues I'd like to point out:
> 1) bandwidth and connection stability
> - will dev with a bad connection be able to really participate in communication?
> (I mean what if voice just dissapers for few or more seconds or worse
> - regularly?)
> if someone has experience with teamspeak on not-very-good connections
> - please share your opinions
> Will be 4-8KB/s enought?

Teamspeak is actually pretty good.  They thought things through pretty
well.  being that it's made for online gaming, soaking too much BW
would kill the playability of the game.  I have no idea how it'd
perform on dialup though.

> 2) the level of understability of native-spoken English by
> non-English-speaking devs
> - it would be nice if native English speakers try to speak sharp and
> not fast in any situations ;-)

One of my worst problems.  I never realize this until I talk to a
non-native speaker.  I enunciate very poorly.  Seriously, feel free to
tell me if I'm talking stupid, because I don't realize it a lot of the
time.

> 3) how we will record the meeting? :-P
> - are there built-in features in server/client or there is some workaround?

Hmmm good question.  I've been meaning to set up a local teamspeak
server at home, but I know no details just yet.