A few weeks ago, nineteen MySQLers had a successful meeting in Berlin. The QA and Build teams invited some guests from other Engineering teams and from Support, and we experimented with a couple of new meeting practices. We’re not yet at Meeting Nirvana, but we felt that we had taken great strides compared to several earlier MySQL Dev Mtgs.
Plenty of literature and blogs exist on arranging good meetings. The scope of this blog article is limited to physical meetings in virtual organisations, i.e. collecting a group of people who work together every day but see each other once or at most twice a year. That special context puts the emphasis on certain decisions and practices, which I attempt at highlighting below.
The twelve items come in a chronological order.
Before, during and after the meeting 1. Set the right meeting goals.
- Try to solve fewer problems than you …