Talk:Affiliations committee/Reports/2012

Scheduling

Scheduling across timezones spanning Hong Kong to Toronto with volunteers having different schedules and time commitments is a major challenge, that is only partially mitigated by the detailed minutes taken on Etherpad. Does Doodle help? Sharihareswara (WMF) (talk) 17:46, 7 May 2013 (UTC)

It does a little but getting the whole committee together at the same time has not been so far possible even with very large doodles (i.e. ones with 10+ options per day and around a week of days to choose from) as we have quite diverse schedules (e.g. students having crazy varied timetables, people working usually free in the evenings which clash with worktime in other time zones etc.) and spanning so many timezones is a real pain (at the last meeting, one of the participants had to wake up at 4am). The best we have come up with so far are conference calls with far less than full attendance and in-person meetings. –Bence (talk) 18:03, 7 May 2013 (UTC)

You have my sympathies. It's a really hard problem. In some other groups with similar problems, sometimes we've had multiple conference calls within a day with partially overlapping membership -- that way everyone gets a chance to be in one of the meetings, and they all sort of combine into one discussion (if everyone looks at the notes). But that's still an ordeal. Sharihareswara (WMF) (talk) 12:53, 8 May 2013 (UTC)