As a contributor and member of the body which is developing the Open Grid Protocol, I’m expected to keep up to date, read chat logs, mailing lists, attend meetings and otherwise spend a lot of my day looking at information, ideas and opinions coming from the various bodies surrounding the AWG.

You’d be surprised how much there is. There’s six reasonably important meetings a week I try read or attend, each produces potentially a 10,000 word transcript. Ignoring mailing lists, and other forms of discussion, that alone is a good healthy paperback each and every week, of course there’s at least now three active mailing lists on top of that and discussions on IRC, Group Chats and elsewhere.

It’s absolutely no suprise then when people get daunted when approaching this, there’s simply too much to keep track of without turning it into a fulltime job.

Signal to Noise Ratio

That is why I’d like to ask everyone who’s contributing, not to stop - but to try help keep the discussions focused. Most of these meetings have a defined spectrum of what is and isnt the topic of the day, and some forums are better than others for specific discussions. (No, I’m not just talking about Permissions here)

That’s not to say what’s being said isnt important - just that when the topic is the value of one specific serialisation format over another please only comment if you have something to say relating to serialisation formats, as mixing and matching topics all over the place is partly one of the reasons that keeping track of comments is so difficult - they are imbued everywhere.

So, here’s a bit of an overview of whats generally discussed where

The Weekly Meetings

• Mark (”Zero Linden”) office hours - The Tuesday office hours tend to be a fairly wide-topic discussion, with the agenda announced at least the week beforehand. You can see what’s going to be discussed on his wiki profile page. The Thursday morning ones tend to be very specific to individual technical items on the specifications themselves.
• OpenSim Office Hours (Tuesday, 1900 UTC, Wright Plaza on OSGrid) - These don’t concern the OGP protocols directly, however the topic of how to add OGP support is often championed here, and Linden Lab maintains a small but regular presence. This is more applicable if you are interested in the OpenSim side of OGP affairs.
• Which Linden office hours - These have recently shifted to people involved in the early beta of the OGP prototyping, SysAdmins and other individuals who will be directly running regions compatible with the OGP spec. If you are interested in being involved in this, this is the meeting to read and attend.
• AWGroupies - If it’s not in the above, the AWGroupies tend to be the best forum. Policy, direction and others are the kinds of discussions most appropriate here. While the other meetings tend to have a very strong technical influence (given it’s related to designing the languages that computers speak to each other with), the AWGroupies has a more social issues and ethics bias.

There’s also several others which are often worth reading and attending.

The Mailing Lists

• SLDev - This is generally focused towards the viewer itself and the features it supports, initially it started as a technical list, but over the course of the last year it has become a more broad spectrum forum open to a larger number of discussions on everything from intellectual property rights (something I have posted about with a suprising degree of frequency lately) to how to compile the viewer on Dead Badger Linux.

• OpenSim-Dev - This is geared towards the OpenSim developers, although topics do spring up here as to the best policies towards default systems, best practices on being a flexible framework that anyone can use. If you are interested in the nitty gritty behind OpenSim there’s a lot of good solid discussion going on here.

• Gridnauts - This is a new mailing list which complements Which’s office hours (listed above) for people who are in the beta and testing the initial region-crossing support on the Linden Beta grid.

At the moment there’s no policies mailing list - which might be something that someone should consider setting up as a legitimate forum for these discussions is clearly needed.

A plea to those involved

Please be relatively concise where possible - brevity always makes it easier to read your (and everyone elses) opinions.

Post your opinions in the right forum at the right time - suddenly changing the topic away while issues are still outstanding on the current topic is somewhat poor form.

Condensed transcripts and summaries help a lot - I personally would appreciate if someone would take up the mantle of providing a summary of each of the meetings above (and possibly mailing lists too) with links into the chat transcripts where appropriate.