Agreed, that’s very true. I’ve been working on getting the Spamassassin team to go back to email/IRC meets for important decision-making, rather than the occasional sprints we were doing at Apachecon hackathons. The sprints were fun, but not really productive — and I think they were excluding the developers who couldn’t make it to Apachecon, which includes many of the core team as well as pretty much all the newbies/occasional-hacker contigent, and the latter is a very important part of open source IMO.

James: I know most of your events are open (like I have said repeatedly all week, Ubuntu is generally a model for this sort of thing) but I did think the sprints were the one exception- my apologies. However you slice it, though, in person is inherently exclusive, and certainly cannot be used as an excuse to forget about communicating with the outside world, whether it is one week a year or fifty-two.

Así se titula una notación de Luis Villa (en inglés), que me ha parecido muy interesante, pero no solo en lo que se refiere al tema que describe el título. En primer lugar me ha gustado porque apunta con claridad a defectos……

Furthermore, there is a pretty big difference between getting the developers together every 6 months is quite different to having them in the same office all the time. The rest of the year they are communicating with each other over public channels (mailing lists, IRC, Launchpad).

Most of this advice would apply to any bloggers working as part of an open, community-oriented software development team, not just on open source software, I think; although OSS is generally more likely to involve a community than non-OSS code is.