There have been some great discussions over the past months during our weekly online meetups and we should continue to talk on a regular basis. I think it is fair to say that the consensus has been that meeting every week is unnecessarily frequent. I doubt any CMCs are moving fast enough to consider and effectively contribute to a new topic every single week. The Fall survey also confirmed that Friday meetups are not ideal for most participants. I think these meetups would benefit from having sharper focus and being held monthly.
One new direction I'd like to suggest is coordinating screencast tutorials as a starting point for new online meetups. RETN is planning on supporting Emily Frazier in putting together a screencast on installation and configuration of Reservations. This would both add a video component to module documentation and also give users who can't make it to the meetups an opportunity to explore the topic of discussion and ask questions. Our hope is that following this screencast, another CMC might sponsor the next screencast for a different module. Our timeline for the Reservations screencast is to post it on drupal sometime in January. Comments can be posted to the video, but it may be more useful to answer questions in person on an online meetup held shortly after the posting of the video.
Obviously, it is not realistic to expect screencasts to be produced on a monthly basis. We can continue to schedule monthly meetups on a specific topic without these.
Comments
I think it makes a lot of
I think it makes a lot of sense to move to a monthly demo/screencast, but the idea that Reservations isn't going to be ready to demo by January highlights the need for more regular checkins with the co-maintainers/product owners.
Stefan has already requested several changes to the 2.x branch of Reservations to make the initial install easier. I've started making these changes, but Reservations is still a DIFFICULT module. MNN has already moved to OG2.x. channelAustin will also be moving to OG2.x as part of their Telvue integration. Once that happens, I will officially deprecate the 1.x branch and start a stable 2.x beta.
Unfortunately, we don't have an active co-maintainer for Project and no concrete plans for when the OG related functionality in Project and Show would be upgraded with a hook instead of a manual process.
I realize that there are several features like reservations, playback server integration, and stable video on demand functions that stations really want. While we've shown many of these can be done, we're far from a sustainable support structure for the difficult parts of the configuration.
Why start with Reservations when there is so much of the Moderate level undocumented and unsupported?
I think a more realistic plan for making Reservations available to Moderate level is...
There has been a lot of conversation about doing cm_ and civicrm_ related sprints at Portland Community Media during DrupalCon and training at BAVC before the ACM. If enough people/organizations step up to take ownership of some part of the kits, getting Reservations stable by May is a realistic goal.
I know I come off as a grumpy old man lecturing teenagers about driving too fast or eating too much junk food, but skipping over the lack of support and documentation for the Moderate Starter Kit is just going to increase the support requests on the people already contributing.
If every already understands the modules included in the Moderate Starter Kit, then it won't take long to document... but my guess is that is not the case and jumping to Reservations is an attempt to get your pudding without eating your vegetables.