1. Project Meetings

Project meetings are held one hour per week currently on Tuesday afternoons. A second one hour special topics meeting is scheduled on all contributor’s calendars but is used infrequently. Dialog at the end of the Tuesday project meeting determines if the special topics meeting time is needed.

1.1. Round Robin Dialog

The meeting begins with round-robin remarks from contributors on key items from the preceding week’s work. The intention is to keep remarks brief and to highlights mainly to ensure everyone is aware of key and impending changes related to VisIt. Sometimes contributors have nothing relevant to VisIt to mention in which case its perfectly fine for the contributor to pass during this round-robin dialog.

1.2. New Issue Triage

New issues are triaged. New issues can be found through a browser using GitHub’s issue search feature and searching for issues missing the reviewed label. During triage, issues are discussed in some detail to help refine meaning and determine impact (low, medium or high) and likelihood (low, medium or high) as well as other special considerations such as whether the issue is manifesting an outright crash, should be given higher priority or may represent low hanging fruit (a small amount of work that will yield high dividends). Descriptions for the meaning of various labels to be applied to issues are provided on the label description page. Some issue submissions require lengthy discussion and dialog to help refine into one (or more) specific bug fixes or enhancement requests. Such issues are converted to discussions and should be gathered together to be discussed in a special topics meeting.

1.3. Unanswered Q&A Discussion Triage

Discussion items that have yet to be answered are triaged. Sometimes a new discussion will get converted to an issue. We don’t currently use any labels for discussions but we have several discussion categories and we may re-categorize discussions to put them in the right category. We close any discussions which have been waiting for user response for more than 21 days.

1.4. Special Topics Meeting Topics/Agenda

We consider the need and interest in using the upcoming special topics meeting time. Sometimes, we opt to use this meeting time for further issue triage. Other times, we decide on some topic(s) to discuss and contributors may prepare some informal materials.

1.5. Inclusive Moment

To begin the first project meeting of each new month a contributor shares an inclusive moment. An inclusive moment is a factoid, resource, event, experience, etc. related to STEAM with the purpose of raising awareness, seeding deeper thinking and/or informing future action. Example inclusive moments which are in scope include…

  • A short description of the book “Black Software” and key take-aways to be learned from reading it.
  • A reminder and reference explaining how color choices in UI design impact color-blind users.
  • Relaying a recent conversation with a colleague that feels Fortran programmers aren’t sufficiently supported in ECP.

Example Inclusive Minutes which are out of scope…

  • Sharing a recent personal negative interaction with an airport security official
    • Rationale: not related to STEAM.
  • Playing the YouTube video “Wny Diversity Matters?”.
    • Rationale: not appropriate length, not related to STEAM.
  • Playing 5 minutes of music created in a recent STEAM hack-a-thon.
    • Rationale: not appropriate length.

Whenever possible, we try to rotate responsibility to a different contributor each time. There are some slides that explain the inclusive moment exercise in a little more detail.