The Infra Roundtable

To provide a space for conversations on issues related to the ASF's infrastructure, Infra holds a monthly roundtable of free-flowing discussion, with the first meeting set for early December, 2022.

• The roundtable takes place on the first Wednesday of each month for an hour, starting at 1800 UTC, in a huddle on Slack's #roundtable channel in the ASF workspace.
• Infra will post the general topic for each month's meeting.
• The roundtables are available to anyone who can access the ASF workspace on Slack: basically, committers and Members.

Roundtables differ from conversation modes such as IRC or an email thread, in which everyone types what they want to say. During the roundtable, people can either speak or type their comments, and the opening presentation and the discussion presume participants are listening, rather than reading. If you follow the chat screen only, with no audio, you will miss significant parts of the meeting. Turning on a webcam, on the other hand, is optional.

To join the roundtable

In The ASF workspace on Slack, enter this command:

/qbot addme roundtable

(qbot is an Infra tool to simplify actions within the ASF Slack workspace.)

roundtable is now in your list of channels. In the future, you will can just click on its link rather than asking to join it again.

When you are in the channel, you can share messages with others as a sort of pre-meeting. At some point an infra staffer will post a message inviting people to join the channel huddle. The link to join the huddle looks like a white dot beside the outline of a headset. Click the link to join the huddle.

What happens in the roundtable

• An Infra team member will normally open the meeting with a short presentation related to the advertised topic, and then throw the floor open to discussion.
• If you are using a microphone, please mute your mic when not speaking, to cut down on ambient noise.
• To contribute to the discussion, either type your message in the meeting thread or unmute and start speaking. We will all try to practice good meeting manners, which include not talking over others.

Questions

Each roundtable has a unique question queue which lives at the very top of the huddle's chat screen. Add there any questions you want to put to the meeting.

The meeting addresses questions according to the number of upvotes they receive: if question 1 has one upvote and question 2 has six, we will address question 2 before question 1.

• To see the thread, click the show thread icon (it looks like a speech balloon).
• The question queue is at the top of the thread.
• To ask a question, scroll to the top of the thread, click the Ask a Question button and write out your question. You will be able to explain your question when we get to it, so you can keep the question short.
• To upvote a question, click its upvote button. Note: you can't remove an upvote once you have voted, so only upvote the questions you really are interested in, rather than, say, upvoting everything.

When the meeting addresses a question, it remains in the list, but with a line through it.

To leave the roundtable

When you want to leave, click the huddle button to leave the huddle. Then move to any other ASF channel of your choice.

After the roundtable

Infra posts a summary of each roundtable's discussion here.

If the meeting does not get to discuss a question you submitted, feel free to ask it in the asfinfra Slack channel, or bring it up again at the next roundtable.