Meetings¶
The Xdev Team has three kinds of regular meetings: Office Hours, Weekly Meetings, and Stakeholder Meetings. Office Hours are for helping scientists with workflow and software problems they experience doing daily work. Weekly meetings are for regular communication on our ongoing work. Stakeholder meetings are for check-ins with our stakeholders, to gather feedback, and to help determine what direction we should be heading.
In general, our goal is to do as much communication asynchronously as possible! That means limiting the number of meetings, and focusing meetings on actual collaboration, rather than just updating each other on our work! However, synchronous communication does have value, and for that reason, we hold these regular meetings.
Office Hours¶
As a courtesy to the NCAR scientific community, we hold Office Hours to help scientists figure out how to use the Pangeo software stack in their day-to-day work. Sometimes Zulip isn’t enough, and you need someone to “sit down with you” and show you the ropes, and that’s what the Office Hours are for.
Office Hours are held every Monday from 3 PM to 5 PM MST/MDT (GMT-7/6) on Zoom. The Zoom link is here. It is password protected, and those that have been invited to the Office Hours Google Event can find the password in the event details. If you are not on the invite list, you are NCAR staff or a collaborator, and you want to join our Office Hours, please contact us at xdev@ucar.edu.
At the conclusion of each Office Hours session, it is important to record the questions and answers that were given during the session in the Xdev Office Hour Summary document. (Only Xdev staff have access to this document!) Particularly useful Q&A sessions should be converted to blog posts on the ESDS Blog, and other Q&A sessions that need to be recorded for future reference should be added to the ESDS FAQ, like appropriate questions from Zulip.
Quick Link
Weekly Meetings¶
The core Xdev Team has weekly meetings to discuss the status of projects and other activities. These meetings are held on Wednesdays from 3:00 PM to 5:00 PM mountain over Google Meet. Once you are a member of Xdev, you should have an event on Google Calendar with connection details. When possible, all Xdev members (core team members and interested stakeholders) are encouraged to attend these meetings. If you are involved in an ongoing Xdev project, then you are strongly encouraged to attend, barring other conflicts (e.g., vacation, other high-priority meetings).
The purpose of Weekly Meetings is to collaborate! It is not to go over what has been done the previous week, or to update everyone on what has been done or what you are planning to do. That’s what GitHub is for! (See How we use GitHub) The Xdev Remote Office on Gather Town is meant to be an open space, and our weekly meeting reservation is meant to be a guaranteed time when we all will be available. However, if there is nothing on the agenda for a meeting one week, then we can simply use the time to hack together.
Quick Link
Stakeholder Meetings¶
Once a quarter (or thenabouts), we hold a meeting to discuss our status as a team with the broader Xdev Stakeholders community. We open this up to everyone who is interested and involved with Xdev, whether at a leadership level or a developer level or just an external interested party.
The purpose of Stakeholder Meetings is to update the larger community on our activity, successes, and future plans. The larger community cannot be expected to follow us on GitHub, so we can’t expect other people to know what we are doing, what we have done, and what we are planning to do! It’s unclear at this point where to have this meeting. Perhaps we should have these meetings in the ESDS Forum space, but we should discuss this when we have an opportunity.