The asterisk paradox

[Jonathan Steffan]

On Fri, 2007-08-10 at 11:30 -0500, Mike McGrath wrote:
> There was some discussion at the last meeting about how to use asterisk 
> in the future for meetings or even if we should.  This has brought up an 
> interesting problem:
> 
> Early adoption of asterisk is slow because not everyone has the 
> equipment to use it.  People don't feel compelled to get the equipment 
> because adoption is slow.
> 
> So what do we do about it?  I feel very strongly asterisk as a medium is 
> much more efficient to use then IRC and helps bring the team together to 
> work as a more cohesive unit.  I also believe it will do the same for 
> other groups.  But we cannot do the meetings in asterisk at this time 
> because it raises the barrier to entry by too much and provides no 
> meeting logs.  So I'd like to propose the following possible solutions.
> 
> 1)  Meet 15 minutes before or after the meeting for a 
> supplemental-meeting in asterisk to shake out some things.  Then 
> continue with the meeting in IRC as normal.
> 2)  Meetings in IRC are generally very slow, it might be worth it to do 
> the meetings as normal but also have people log in to asterisk to bs and 
> generally just chat, get to know each other a bit better.
> 3) Do as we did last week, have people who can't talk join the 
> conference anyway and ask questions in the chat room while having 
> someone transcribe and provide minutes.

+1


> 4) ?  you come up with some.
> 
> In general I think 2) is most practical for now.  I'd prefer 3) since I 
> think everyone can have headphones and listen in to the main meeting and 
> ask questions in IRC but having someone volunteer to transcribe / 
> summarize the meeting is a huge commitment.
> 
> This is a big change for us, having said that I think anyone who has 
> used the technology will agree that it works very well.  It will work 
> even better as people start to use it more and get used to their 
> equipment and more people feel the need to get a proper mic/head set.  
> Fedora is very much about new technologies and early adoption.  I'd love 
> for us to be the first OSS community to use asterisk like this, and of 
> course if Fedora is going to use it, the Infrastructure team should lead 
> the way.  Having said that, any changes like this are raising the 
> barrier to entry and that is just a dangerous thing to do.  As long as 
> we still have IRC I think we'll be fine but this is something we must 
> choose as a group.
> 
> Thoughts?

Should we look at testing speech to text?

Jonathan