Nav2 Working Group Meeting - Time Change

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Hi all,

Your Friendly Neighborhood Navigator here, I wanted to quickly mention that the Nav2 working group meetings will now be at 12pm PST rather than 2pm PST as they have been previously. This is to improve the attendance and better timing for our European colleagues that would like to join as well!

Interested in joining us? Add the event to your calendar:

https://docs.ros.org/en/rolling/The-ROS2-Project/Governance.html#upcoming-ros-events

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This is an improvement and long being requested (I myself would love to join these meetings), but still far from convenient for us Europeans.

12 PM PST is 9 PM in Central Europe. That’s simply too late for anything formal or recurrent. It’s the time wherein:

  • you bring kids to bed :baby:
  • you start dinning (if you’re a spaniard :man_facepalming: )
  • you should be resting for the next day, whatever that means for you.

Even worse for folks in Asia, it’s 1:30 AM for our team in India. With Nav2 meetings not being recorded, following updates is tough. Any chance we can improve this further to include also Asia?

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Nice points @vmayoral. Maybe if @smac and others in the community are willing, I would probably suggest 6 PM CET, which is 9 AM PST and 10:30 PM Indian Standard Time (9:30 PM IST when there is daylight saving in Europe and US) that will be much better for all I hope. Just a suggestion though. If someone from Australia wants to join, then it gets complicated :sweat_smile:

For me (who living in Europe) 9 PM works already better compared to 11 PM.

With Nav2 meetings not being recorded, following updates is tough.

As you rightly said, we can probably start making minutes of the meeting, so that the folks who couldn’t join can easily get up to speed with the Nav2 community.

If there needs to be something discussed with the maintainers, I guess you can easily contact them even outside the WG-Meetings. :smile:

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I announced ahead of time that we would be discussing this this week and if you had thoughts to either let me know prior or to attend. This is the decision we made in the meeting with no objections in the meeting or from the received prior feedback.

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Hey @smac, unfortunately the only place I see the announcement about timing discussion taking place was made less than 24 hours before the meeting on the slack channel. It’s easy to be missed if it’s at such a short notice (I may have probably missed it if it was made on discourse or elsewhere as well).

Also I had brought this topic up with you at ROSCON Japan. Even attending a single meeting to bring up this point about timings is difficult as the meetings are on weekdays at 3:30 A.M for India and surrounding regions.

From your point of view it may be that there are no attendees or interest from Asia so why do we need to move it to accomodate them, but if we can’t even attend a single meeting or interact then how will the interest be generated.Since recordings are not available like they are for most of other WGs it’s impossible to keep track and try and contribute even if we want to! It’s a chicken and egg problem.

I have a few suggestions:

  1. It’s not possible to suit every time zone which is understandable, atleast keep it rotating with 2 different times every alternate month or so, ROS Industrial Dev Meetings do that and it works quite well.
  2. Put out a poll for a longer period(a few days atleast) on discourse ( not everyone is aware of nav2 slack channel) about preferences of the community and that may give you a more clear picture which can help you make a decision.
  3. Meetings are recorded and made publicly available.(You may have a good reason for not doing this that I am unaware of).

You are doing some great work with Nav2 and I think a large community is missing out on this.

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Seconding Prateek’s suggestion of running a poll about convenient time for a few days on Discourse.

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I very much appreciate where you are coming from. I spend a good deal of my time listening and understanding the needs of the community and users to calibrate my own time and efforts. However this is an area that I’m under other constraints and trying to be as flexible as I can while still meeting the needs of myself and other stakeholders.

This may evolve over time and happy to reevaluate this when situations change.