Meetings

For many open-source projects, collaboration happens primarily on text-based online forums such as a project’s issue tracker or a community forum. Over time, maintainers and contributors may feel they would benefit from having synchronous meetings to discuss project matters or to organize discussions around roadmap, specific projects or the general governance of the project.

In addition, having dedicated meeting times for triage, onboarding newcomers or working groups such as documentation, website, design or translations may also be helpful.

The following guide, developed in collaboration with the Scientific Python project, describes a few of the meetings we have experimented with and when they are useful: Meeting types.

Community meetings

Regular community meetings are essential for larger projects that require a high level of coordination in different projects, roadmap items or governance. However, even smaller projects may benefit from synchronous discussions. These meetings can be a way to:

  • Connect with your community, and put a human face on the people behind the commit handle. This can be especially helpful when dubious or unclear communication happens via text - a conversation can prevent many conflicts from arising.
  • Discuss complex technical implementations or conduct contribution reviews. This can be its own meeting (a “triage meeting”) but depending on your community needs it can be helpful and make the review of a long or complex contribution faster.
  • Plan for your roadmap or create strategies for high-stakes projects. Funding, new releases, architectural or governance decisions can also benefit from a live discussion. In this case, it is even more important to keep a record of the discussion and, ideally, keep that record public for your community to consult.

New contributor meetings

A special type of meeting we have been experimenting with is the “newcomer” or “New contributor” meetings. As noted in the page linked above, these can be organized as “Office hours” meetings - inviting questions and requests for support from new contributors; they can be organized as webinars, with talks or sessions on a specific aspect of contributing, such as the contribution workflow or running tests, for example; and they can also be practical working sessions, such as a walking through a full contribution task with the participants.

Projects with a larger contributor base will find more value in these meetings than projects with a low number of new contributors. Make sure to also consider timezones and maintainer bandwidth when considering these meetings for your project. One central point to keep in mind is to use these meetings as an opportunity to set expectations for newcomers - about how long it takes for a contribution to be reviewed, how new features are discussed in the project or the areas that would best be served by contributors with less experience in the project.

Optional: Post-meeting poll

If you are interested in having anonymous feedback from meeting attendees, consider setting up a post-meeting poll to ask if the meeting was useful, if they felt welcome or if they need extra support. Many meeting platforms support this as an automatic feature, but you can also share a link during the meeting.

General tips

  • Make sure you mention your Code of Conduct or any other expectations for positive participation in your community as often as possible.
  • There is no rule for how long a meeting will last, or what day/time is best. Consider alternating timezones regularly, experimenting with different times and be ready to reevaluate if you feel things are not working that well.
  • Have a meeting notes document, ideally open to all. This document will contain the agenda for the meeting, notes on what was decided/discussed, and if appropriate a record of who attended (with their internet handle attached if they are comfortable sharing!). For our new contributors meeting this is particularly important so that we can track folks who come to the meeting in our issues trackers later. Make sure you ask for consent before noting personal information in the notes if they are kept public.
  • Have a public calendar listed on your website, and make sure to keep it up-to-date, particularly if you need to cancel a regular meeting.
  • If you use different communication channels, such as mailing lists, slack or other asynchronous chat/forum platform, make sure to announce the meetings there.
  • Meetings tend to be more useful and productive if a basic agenda is set in advance, so that folks know what will be discussed during that time.
  • It may be useful to record the session for the benefit of those who cannot attend, or to share online with the larger community. In that case, be sure to ask for consent to record, and offer people to mute and turn off their video.
Tip

Many people benefit from these meetings, but for many different reasons can’t turn on their camera or speak aloud during the meeting. This may be due to internet issues, hardware or personal situations including their work environment or accessibility requirements. Ideally, they need a way to participate via text, either through the meeting chat or the meeting notes document.