Re: Contributor Summit planning

> >   - format
> > 
> >     For those who haven't attended before, it's basically 25-ish Git
> >     (and associated project) developers sitting in a room for a day
> >     chatting about the project. Topics go on a whiteboard in the
> >     morning, and then we discuss each for 30-60 minutes.
> > 
> >     We could do multiple days (which might give more room for actually
> >     working collaboratively instead of just discussing). We could do
> >     something more formal (like actual talks). We could do something
> >     less formal (like an all-day spaghetti buffet, where conversation
> >     happens only between mouthfuls). The sky is the limit. Some of those
> >     ideas may be better than others.
> 
> I found the unconference-style, one day meeting to be most productive.
> 
> As to more formal? I don't know... talks seem to be fun and all, but they
> require a lot of preparation. Something championed in our standups are
> "chalk talks", i.e. somebody presenting in a bit more detail what they are
> working on, in particular explaining the context (think: Stolee
> enlightening the audience about finer points of computational graph
> theory) *without* preparing for it specifically. That makes for fun
> presentations, if a bit more chaotic than a real "conference talk". This
> format obviously lends itself to Google Hangouts.
> 
> As to multiple days: Of course it would be nice to have a kind of a "hack
> day", but I wonder how productive this would be in the context of Git,
> where interests very so widely.

> Rather than have a "hack day", I would actually prefer to work with other
> contributors in a way that we have not done before, but which I had the
> pleasure of "test ballooning" with Pratik: using Visual Studio Code Live
> Share. This allows multiple users to work on the same code base, in the
> same worktree, seeing what each other is doing. It requires a separate
> communication channel to talk; Pratik & I used IRC, but I think Google
> Hangout (or Skype or WhatsApp or <insert-your-favorite-chat-here>) would
> have worked a bit better. It's kind of pair programming, but with some of
> the limitations removed.