notes from Ubuntu Down Under
I'm at the Ubuntu Down Under conference at the Vibe Hotel in Rushcutter's Bay, Sydney. We're here through to Saturday 2005-04-30, feel free to drop by if you're around.
This idea of open company conferences is very 21st-century: here we are having a major company meeting, open to the open source community, our users, partners, etc.
The schedule is full of "BOF Sessions", where people talk about various issues, mostly setting the requirements and high-level designs for what we will build over the next year. (And I mean full: the programme, which is mandatory for employees, runs from 9am to after 8pm.) After each session, one or two people are required to write it up into a "spec" on the wiki, such as the one called GrumpyGroundhog. These specs get reviewed by various people, including professional technical editors.
This has several very interesting consequences.
Requiring people to write down notes after the session avoids having really interesting conversations and then forgetting about them, or forgetting some of the details.
Getting reasonably polished documentation out the end helps keep people who couldn't get to the conference in the loop.
Getting developers involved in developing the requirements for different parts of the business brings a remarkable advance in signup and understanding of the whole business context.
posted Thu 28 Apr 2005 in /conf/udu | link
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