Community video chats?

[Phil Cohen]

Many of us enjoy the fast-paced collaboration that happens during Mercurial's sprints. Alas, they only happen twice a year. In the interim, many of us have used ad-hoc videoconferencing to whiteboard ideas ahead of code review, and this has worked pretty well. It'd be great to do even more here.

One thing that was suggested in the last group get-together was to establish a regular time for community members to “hang out” on VC if they're available, and discuss any technical topics or proposals that come up. The goal is for this to be informal, replicating the sprint atmosphere as much as possible, so there'd be no need for a strict agenda (though we could create one if there's sufficient demand for topics). If nobody ends up wanting to talk about anything (a remote scenario, perhaps :) we can always end early.

These video chat sessions should hopefully fill a niche that's poorly satisfied by IRC or e-mail today: discussing topics in-depth at high bandwidth before patches hit the mailing list.

Does this sound like something people would want to participate in? If so, we should hash out a good time (spitballing: Friday mornings? One problem is between US, Europe, and Japan, you can only ever pick satisfactory times for two of the three), frequency (fortnightly?), and videochat platform (Augie and I have used http://appear.in before and it seems to work well).

Phil