2021-04-14 All-hands meeting notes

General updates

Jeffrey Wagner Karmen Condic-Jurkic

• Next OpenFF workshop

  • There will be a workshop later this year. It will be very short – Likely ~2 hours on a single day. This is for the benefit of the audience – Zoom workshops aren’t very useful/tolerable. We’ll highlight progress since the last workshop and talk about what’s coming next, and allow an hour for discussion. We won’t record talks in advance, but we will ask everyone for a few slides for the keynote talk. Our goal is to ask industry partners which other topics they’d like to discuss and have followup sessions.

  • Likely date is early June, so we’re at roughly T-2 months.

  • JW – Budget time for more meetings after the workshop.

  • DM – For example, partners might ask for a more detailed talk/demo session on bespoke fitting, which we’d have in the weeks following the meeting.

• Marking “open” meetings on calendar?

  • JW – Add label (open) to any meeting that is open to everyone who wants to join. (All agree).

  • DM – Also add a descriptive title, I assume I’m not needed in the meetings labeled with initials only.

• Opened up Infrastructure on confluence

  • Add tags, and perhaps several parent pages

  • DD - On public space, the aggregation of meeting notes without further disambiguation has less to a bit of structurelessness. It would be good to do the same for infrastructure, possibly organized by repo, but maybe organized by name or theme.

  • IP – I’ve been using the browser history (URL autocomplete) more than confluence searches. Better titles and labels would really help here.

• Roadmap updates

  • KCJ – We haven’t updated the roadmaps since September 2020. I’d recommend that we make copies of the existing roadmaps for 2021, and modify those. Keeping the 2021 roadmap separate from 2020 will give a better view of what’s progressed, sicne otherwise we’ll be deleteing things with no record left on the most up to date copy.

  • KCJ – Should we use all-hands meetings to do this review?

  • JW – Last time took ~4 meetings to fully review. Should we spend that much time again?

  • KCJ – I think it was worthwhile.

  • DM – JW and SB can update these and show these at the next all-hands

• Jeffrey Wagner will make 2021 infrastructure roadmap, circulate for feedback, and then lead an all-hands meeting to review it
• Simon Boothroyd will circulate the current scientific roadmap for feedback, and then lead an all-hands meeting to review it

• DM – Could have a period of a few weeks after the all-hands meeting to collect new items

• JW – It’s probably best do the item addition period before the review, so that the items are listed before assigning personnel

• PB – What about things like Strike Team ? Would this belong on the roadmap/in the roadmap review meeting?

  • SB – These items are already basically assigned, so I don’t think they’d need to be in the roadmap review.

• Regular coffees/happy hours?

  • KCJ – I’ve seen a lot of advice on this online, not sure how we could handle time zones.

  • DM – Could call tham “happy hour/tea time” to cover different social expectations around beverages. Could do board games like Catan.

  • KCJ – Breakout rooms would be a good idea, since it can be hard to get 20 people together.

  • OM – there’s “gather.town”, where you have a character on a map, and your audio is based on who you’re near. Used it once in a small group and it was nice.

  • JW – Should we indicate which time zone/region is the focus of a social event, or try to have a single event for everyone

  • DM – Would recommend a single event that changes times, so it’s most appropriate for different regions on different days.

  • KCJ – Could alternate between US/Pacific and Europe each week.

• DM – “No meeting days”? Tuesdays?

  • DM – I’d like tuesdays, not sure if I can block off others

  • MT – Working meetings could still be allowed on those days.

  • DD – I’d suggest not having any regular meetings on Tuesdays and Thursdays. One-off meetings are ok.

  • JW – Want to draw a distinction between external and internal meetings. We should also try to push all external meetings also to Mon-Wed-Fri. It would be good if we could conform all meetings to this policy.

  • DM – The problem might be running out of overlapping time with other relevant time zones, but we should try.

  • DD – My policy has been to never offer times on Tues/Thurs, but to be flexible if meetings need to fall there.

• KCJ – Will set up an OpenFF Discourse to have a general-purpose public forum.

• KCJ – Open Molecular Software Foundation (OMSF) is moving ahead. This should make things easier to work with on the backend, but nobody here should notice a difference.