In October of last year we decided to change the schedule for our plenary meetings to meetings on the 5th, the 15th and the 25th of every month, starting from January 2025 (see Meeting schedule Q1-2 2025). Whenever these dates are on a Saturday or a Sunday, the meeting happens in the morning, otherwise we meet at 19:30.
In the past we used to meet every two or three weeks (changing day from Monday to Tuesday to Thursday and back), with occasional meetings during the weekend.
The purpose of this thread is to do an online review on how this has been going. @reeflings, if you have any thoughts you want to share, can you please do so by 25 August?
Given the late deadline (because of the summer break) and the need for some predictability in the calendar, I am going to assume that the schedule will continue to run as it did at least until the end of October. This does not mean we won’t change the schedule if that would be the outcome of this thread, just that I’m trying to be practical for now.
Kind request: would there be somebody who would be willing to add the dates for the plenaries in the Nextcloud calendar?
For me it worked wonderfully well. Whenever we didn’t need the meeting, we cancelled it. In all other cases, it turned out that we really needed the time to be able to make decisions in time.
I really love the predictability: it works well for my personal calendar (no need to wonder when the next plenary is), and it seemed to work well for planning topics coming from teams, as well as for the architects.
The days of the week (week days and weekends) turned out to be completely haphazard (with enough weekend days). This too worked really well for me.
10 days to me feels like the minimum preparation time for a plenary meeting (less would be complicated).
Agree with Lee. That said, I would prefer to reduce the frequency of the plenaries. They take up a lot of quality time, and I would prefer to rebalance in favour of “doing work”.
It looks like we are running into scheduling conflicts because the dates are not on the calendar yet, which is not great in terms of efficiency. Would there be somebody who would be willing to spend a fraction of their “two hours per week” on adding the plenary meetings to the Nextcloud calendar?