[ros-users] [Discourse.ros.org] [Next Generation ROS] Design process of ROS 2

[Kyle Fazzari via Discourse.ros.org]

[quote="wjwwood, post:6, topic:7782"]

However, I recently had some design related discussions with a community member (@kyrofa sorry to single you out) and it was honestly much more productive than back and forth on GitHub or discourse are usually. So Id like to see more of this kind of chat to see if it helps these cases.

[/quote]



I was coming to say pretty much exactly this. IRC isn't perfect, although we've been using it successfully for _years_ in Ubuntu. If we were starting today would we use something else? Maybe, but I don't think the choice of tech matters so much as long as it's open to everyone and consistently used and attended (including Open Robotics folks). We have rooms with hundreds of people in it, and our community knows that us Canonical employees are always there. How do they know? Because we have our own design discussions there, live, in front of everyone. Some of us actually used Telegram for about a year because we were starting to tire of IRC, but we ended up finding that having design discussions and making architectural decisions out of the public eye ended up making our community feel a little alienated and out of the loop. This conversation sounds familiar :) .



I totally get that being on <chat platform> and being pinged causes a context switch that quickly eats up time, but delegation is key here-- if everyone is there, we can all share the load. And I've actually told people "I'm sorry, I'd love to help but I'm slammed right now, can you come back tomorrow maybe an hour earlier in the day?" and they will.



Not every community works like Ubuntu, I get that. One of the reasons we're able to have design discussions in front of everyone is that Canonical is a 100% remote company, and we have to have those conversations _somewhere_. We might as well have them in public, and that has worked really well for us. As I understand it, Open Robotics is not a remote company, but you're working with a large community who is. Having discussions in chat instead of in-person would probably slow you down, but I wanted to share my perspective.











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