How IRC Meetings are Run

Start of month: Release planning
At the beginning of every release (usually, the first Saturday of every month) at 4 PM America/New_York time, we have a release planning meeting, where we:


 * talk about how the last release went
 * talk about what our goals should be for the next release
 * create a release plan on the wiki (along the lines of e.g. 0.11.11)
 * preliminarily assign tasks to ourselves and others.

This meeting is not for coding help, though if people want to powwow on OpenHatch features or ask for help after the meeting is over, that seems like a likely and reasonable thing to happen.

Mid-month: Release check-in
At the second-to-last week of the release (usually two weeks after the release planning meeting), we have a devel meeting (4 PM Saturday America/New_York time). At this meeting:


 * People report what they're working on, and ask for help as needed
 * We check if we're making adequate progress toward our stated release goals.

Ongoing, twice weekly: Office hours
During the Saturday meeting time on the other weeks, and one other day per week every week (date/time TBD), we hold "office hours".

At these times:


 * Asheesh and other OpenHatch contributors will be listening in IRC
 * We will help newcomers find FOSS projects to work on or contribute to OpenHatch itself
 * Veteran OH contributors are encouraged to hack on OH during office hours and ask for help then, as well

(Side note: Asheesh, Jessica, and others of course hang out in #openhatch all the time doing this sort of thing. The point of having formal "office hours" is so we can publish them in our contributor guide / wiki / wherever and point newcomers to a specific time and place where they can get reliable help, since we would otherwise be having devel meetings far less frequently.)

Converting to your local time
We run formal meeting every Saturday at 4PM US/Eastern.

To convert that to your time use (for example):

date -d "16 April 2011 4pm EDT"

or use The World Clock website (for example):

http://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/converted.html?day=16&month=4&year=2011&hour=16&min=0&sec=0&p1=43&p2=22

Tech that helps
Formal meetings are run using the MeetBot plugin for sufjan, our supybot.

http://meetbot.debian.net/Manual.html