We have discussions now!

[DanielPuthawala]

Hi all Catstronauts!

We’ve been doing some high-level planning so far, but are moving now into the nuts and bolts of schema development. I think that adding discussions to the Cat-VRS repository here on Github will help us do that for a number of reasons:

First, I’ve been giving a lot of thought about the high level formal features of the system so far, but popping in to share my thoughts and modelling just during calls is not enough to let you follow what I’m thinking, and definitely not enough time to offer feedback. (And this is similar to feedback I’ve gotten from connect.) And as we move into nuts-and-bolts development I WILL need more input on this stuff!

Similarly, Since we’re making such rapid progress, one hour twice a month is too short a time to satisfy how much I need to communicate to and from you all, especially with lots of folks in disparate time zones, discussion threads will allow us to collaborate asynchronously between meetings.

Unlike email, where I have several email chains going with many of you individually, having discussion threads in a common location will probably help consolidate that information into one place so that people can learn from other people’s questions, and I don’t have to keep track (and inevitably lose) track of what I’ve told people individually.

Unlike Slack (which will undoubtably remain useful!), centering discussions here will allow us to keep those records in the same place alongside the schema repositories, which seems like a good idea from a process-documentation and decision-justification perspective.

Finally, until I have another co-lead who can help keep me on time with agenda updates, it’s clear that I suck at planning well enough to get Cat-VRS materials out for the agenda ahead of meetings on a regular basis. This structure will allow me to try something different, namely making discussion threads to bring up ideas or design proposals as they arise, which can then be reviewed by people, and basically whatever threads are new or have been significantly updated since the last meeting are what go on the agenda to hash out in the subsequent meeting slot.

You all are of course welcome (and vigorously encouraged!) to discussion threads as well, particularly if you have new ideas or questions!

I hope using discussion posts like this will help me communicate with you and and you all with each other on Cat-VRS stuff, help me better organize meeting agenda stuff, a keep a better record of our discussions and decision-making, and allow folks to get involved asynchronously on a more consistent basis.