ForrestFriday monthly get-together

On the second Friday of each month we have a 24-hour get-together using the dev mailing list, Internet Relay Chat (IRC), and other collaborative tools, to work on Forrest development and get to know each other.

ForrestFriday starts at 06:00 UTC (6am Greenwich Mean Time in London) and lasts for 24 hours.

The next event will take place on ?? ?? 2006. (Note: See recent mail discussion - not happening until further notice.) See start time and zone overlap.

The day is devoted to working collaboratively to solve particular issues and getting to know each other. In the weeks leading up to each event, decide on the dev mailing list what the main topic should be. Probably something that needs groups work (e.g. moving the internal format to be XHTML2).

There will also be an effort to clean up the Issue Tracker.

The dev mailing list is still the main form of communication and all decisions are made there. The IRC channel is to support that and provide a place for near real-time discussion.

The IRC channel is definitely not open continuously. It is only for temporary communications at this monthly meeting.

This is not a user help forum, please do that on the user mailing list.

• All volunteers are welcome.
• Get an IRC client (some are mentioned at irchelp.org) and see IRC Tutorial.
• Read the dev mailing list. That is where any decisions will be made and the name of the IRC channel will be announced.
• At the start time, connect to irc.freenode.net and join the channel.
• The discussion will be logged, summarised, and added to our "events" SVN repository.
• ASF committers should try to use a nickname that matches their ASF committer id. Please also apply for an "IRC hostname cloak". This hides your machine hostname. It also enables ASF oversight processes to ensure that project PMC members are participating. Instructions are in our SVN at https://svn.apache.org/repos/private/committers/docs/freenode-cloaks.txt
• See notes about the topic of the day.
• We hope to also have a Lenya instance. This will enable a "whiteboard" for the day, and also be the first step for later Forrest-Lenya integration.

• Send a reminder email to dev- prior to the event. Send one about a week beforehand so that the Topic can be decided and to remind people that it is happening (it comes around quickly). Send another the day before the event. Then do the following on the day ...
• The first person to join the IRC channel is the operator.
• See the irchelp.org guide for channel operators.
• Make sure that your irc client is creating a logfile.
• Decide on a channel name. Join it a bit before the start time, then do this setup ...
• Set the channel mode: /mode +n
• Declare today's topic: /topic ForrestFriday: XHTML2 core and Jira cleanup
• Ask cheche to start the logger bot and tell the URL for the live logfile.
• Make sure that your client is creating a logfile.
• Begin a summary text file in the "forrest-events" SVN. Committers should add to this during the day. Don't leave it until the end.
• Announce to the dev mailing list that the channel is open and tell the channel name and the URL for the live log.
• During the session, occasionally refer to the live logfile URL. People can read what they missed, and also refer to previous discussion by stating the time that it occurred.
• At the end, everyone leaves the channel and it will automatically close. Ask cheche to stop the logger bot.
• Add the logfile to the Forrest Events repository.