Canonical has just announced that the Ubuntu Developer Summit will no longer be face to face and every six months. Instead it will be entirely online and virtual, using Google Hangouts. (Here is the announcement.)
On the surface, this seems like a good idea: It's cheaper monetarily, it appears to open things up to people who are unable to travel, and it makes it easier to make complete records.
However, I think it's a bad idea, for several interrelated reasons.
Some decision making needs face-time to happen. For whatever reasons, internet-only communication is not enough for a good enough "meeting of the minds" for sticky or subtle engineering and design decisionmaking.
The IETF, who probably have the longest
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"Life is", goes a saying in my native Finland, a country not known for using superfluous words. While this saying may take compactness a tad too far, it's a great way to say "things happen", mostly to stoically adapt, sometimes to justify actions taken in order to adapt. The brevity of the expression adds not just to the perceived wisdom, but also makes resistance futile. The expected and usual reaction is agreement; I have yet to experience a situation where somebody would counterargue that "life is not".
