[Jester's Trek] CSM8 Status report: Week nineteen
CSM8 Status report: Week nineteen
Minutes! Writing minutes is about as much fun as PvE grinding, maybe about as much fun as structure grinding.
Well, nah. It's not that bad. But it is a very structured sort of writing that eats a lot of time and is technically demanding. It's a bit like writing a book report, only you have to accurately report everything that every character says. Fortunately, we've got the video recordings of most of the sessions. Unfortunately, it's most and not all because of all the technical issues that we had at the summit. I myself had to write the minutes for one session this past week where no video existed at all! Fortunately, I kept really good notes in Iceland during the proceedings so I was able to reproduce what happened.
Anyway, the process of writing the minutes this time started with long back-and-forth chats with CCP Dolan about what we could and could not write about. Out of what I call 24 sessions, four of them were flatly NDA'ed right at the outset so those get pushed back to the last set of minutes that gets published. That's a pity because I'm really hip to write the minutes for one of those sessions, a project I'm really kind of excited about.
After that, we set up a list of the sessions that needed documenting and people started signing up for the sessions that interested them. And then, unfortunately for several people who volunteered the process stopped cold right there. I'm not naming names yet, but as of the time that I'm publishing this, only four of the fourteen CSM8 members have written one or more sessions, and only two -- Trebor Daehdoow and myself -- have written more than one. Yes, I'm cracking the whip. But no, I'm not ready to name names quite yet. Fortunately, enough has been written at this point that we can send the first batch to Dolan for review, and hopefully from there to in front of your eyeballs soon.
Official meetings have started back up as well, with two this past week. The first was a meeting about "project 1" that we were briefed on at the first day of the summit. The CSM had significant concerns about one small part of this project and CCP Fozzie was on vacation during the summit itself. So he graciously agreed to meet with us outside of the normal cycle to listen to our concerns and hash them out. I think it's fair to say he did a great job of addressing those concerns and we're feeling a lot more comfortable with the plans for this project. Overall, I think EVE players are gonna be really pleased with it and I can't wait to start writing about it. "Project 1" has a chance of being a quite literal game-changer in a lot of ways.
That was Monday. Thursday was the day for our regularly scheduled stake-holder meeting with Team Five-0. Owing to another round of the Icelandic death flu going around, this one was sparsely attended. Still, we covered a lot of ground, including some follow-up information about "project 1" from the Monday meeting and a couple of more minor items that Team Five-0 is also working on for winter. Everything's going smoothly and the CSM members present were able to provide feedback on the various items being worked on.
Discussion then turned to EVE Vegas, which Fozzie is going to be attending with CCP Rise as well as other CCP'ers. I can't remember if he let it slip here or at the SCL that same Saturday, but I think he managed to share a bit of information that will be the tipping point to get me to Vegas as well...
Other than the minutes and the meetings, normal CSM activities also continue. We're up to five major Skype channels with CCP now, an informal chat channel, a PvE-focused channel, and open dialogs with three of the four feature teams (with the fourth one coming soon, we're told). So kudos to Dolan there! He's really hustling to get CCPers communicating with CSM members and vice versa. Activity on the forums is also spinning up. So, plenty for CSM members to do, no doubt about it!
Externally, Trebor did an interview with the Down the Pipe podcast and Ali Aras has resumed regular Space Hangouts.
EDIT (18/Sep/2013): Updated with the link of Trebor's interview.
The focus in the rest of the week is going to be getting more minutes sessions written and getting them cleared, then learning how these things get published. Stay tuned!
Source: CSM8 Status report: Week nineteen