GNU Hackers' Meeting

These meetings were held in Europe to get developers to know one another. These meetings were recorded at www.rivervalley.tv.

The meetings were held to overcome inadequacy of as a primary form of communication among GNU developers.

Among other motivations for the meetings were:

Motivating volunteers to contribute to older programs can be difficult.

What is the role of the GNU project developers after the software has matured?

How should priorities for development be set?

Though programs may be old, they still must be maintained, so volunteerism among developers is still important. Among important ongoing tasks are those of portability.

Among questions raised during the talk was this: Should developers spend time portingc their software to proprietary operating systems? Doing so gives the free program a wider audience, but costs much developers' time.

Motivation for the developers' meeting:

To support development of GNU software. The field of "Computer Supportive Cooperative Work" contains prior studies on how computers can be used to facilitate collaboration.

A matrix is used to categorize work:

                 time
              synchronous              asynchronous

place: local face-to-face

       remote    irc                      email,web

Most developers of free software spend their time in the asynchronous/remote category. This is called "computer mediated communication" in the literature.

Computer-mediated communication has obvious positive effects: It's cheap and many developers can participate from different areas. This style of communication is best for partitionable tasks. Until now, most GNU software development has been partitionable.

But as the GNU system grows, many tasks arise that are not partitionable.

Some of the negative effects recorded in the literature are:

1. Communication is less robust: Misunderstandings flourish, and many developers are unaware of each others' efforts.

2. Establishing common ground is difficult. Studies show humans tend to reach agreement more easily face-to-face.

3. "Increased interpersonal conflicts" (flame wars): flaming can destroy motivation to contribute.

Being productive in the future requires avoiding these effects. The GNU Hackers' meetings are one attempt to do so, though having such in-person meetings is difficult over distances. There should be other technological solutions to the problem.