Academic labs have long had the tradition of the weekly lab meeting, where all topics of interest to the lab are discussed. IPython has strong roots in academia, but it is also an open source project that needs to engage an active international community. So while our goal with IPython is not to publish the next paper, we've been thinking about the value these regular discussions bring to how teams work on sustained efforts involving difficult problems, and wanted to bring that bit of academic practice into the open source workflow. So we have decided to conduct weekly "lab meetings" for IPython, that will be held publicly using a Google Hangout on Air.
We are trying to keep things simple and with a minimum of new moving parts:
- Meetings happen on Tuesdays at 10am California time (i.e. UTC-8 or -7 depending on the time of year).
- We broadcast the meeting as it happens via G+ and leave the public YouTube link afterwards.
- During the meeting, all chat that needs to happen by typing can be done on our Gitter chat room.
- We keep a running document with minutes of the meeting on HackPad where we summarize main points. (2015 part 1)
We welcome and encourage help from others in updating these minutes during the meeting, but we'll make no major effort in ensuring that they are a detailed and accurate record of the whole discussion. We simply don't have the time for that.
You can find a list of the videos on the ipythondev YouTube user page.