Remote Hackfests initiative

The GNOME community promotes hackfest all around the world to try to bring GNOME developers together and spend some days hacking in any of the GNOME apps or technologies. These hackfest are great because allow us to build a solid community with social interaction and living together for a few days.

But a lot of people can't participate in these events because family, travel costs (this is fixed by the foundation), work or other problems.

This initiative tries to fix these problems, creating full remote hackfests or trying to make the future in place hackfests remote friendly.

Note: Here are some ideas to try to bring more people to GNOME, feel free to complete or discuss anything if you've some experience with remote working or remote events

Participant needs

• A good connection (Maybe the foundation can pay for a coworking if anyone doesn't have a good connection at home?)
• Headsets

Common Infrastructure

One of the most important parts of a remote hackfest will be the communication so we'll need a good communication tool:

• Audio sharing with multiple people in the room
• Video sharing (I don't know if this is really needed, maybe not)
• Chat
• Screen sharing
• Channels inside the hackfest room to be able to work 1:1 or small groups?

Options:

• mumble:
  • Only audio

  • Open source client & server

  • Multiple channels
  • Not web but there's a mobile version
• jitsi
• skype
• google hangout
• bluejeans

In place hackfest remote friendly

The big problem with the remote people trying to participate with a group of people that's in the same place is the communication outside the remote channel, and it's too easy to forget about these people, that are not present there, if they don't talk a lot. But there are some good practices that we can try to follow in any hackfest to let remote people to participate more.

• Try to keep an open channel for remotes, no matter if there is no one there, maybe someone is joining latter and they don't need to request to open.
• Ask actively to remote people, small talk is good to create community.
• Use this communication tool in place as much as possible and write down any conversation or question, don't forget about remote people.
• Screen sharing is a very good thing for people to learn, so maybe it'll be good to do some public or private screen sharing sessions so anyone can view how a GNOME hacker works on a new feature or fixes some bugs.
• Have a planning with dates, published, so remote people can join to that specific event, like quick questions, screen sharing events, task discussion, etc.

The social part is hard to be shared, so I think we should not try to bring remote people to the lunch or beers after the hacking day, we'll do that in the future when the technology allow us to do it