Meeting Minutes - Wednesday, March 31th 2010

Attendees

 * Xavier, David, Aurélien.
 * Notes : Aurélien
 * Place : Somewhere at Ménilmontant

Next Meeting

 * Xavier, David and Aurélien will gather on Saturday morning (April 3th). We will discuss the business plan :
 * Which story do we want to tell to the potential investors (problem, solution, market, why we are the best) => improve  the power point document.
 * Evaluation of the validity of David assumption (salaries, charges, benefits, etc.).
 * All remarks are always welcome, don’t hesitate !

Mailing List

 * Assuming that, for now, since it is the beginning of the community, we have a natural leading and animating role on the mailing list, the problem was how to distribute the roles of animation.
 * Until now, we can do the statement that it was mostly Xav who animated the ML. From now on, David, Xav and Aurélien will try to answer individually to all thread of discussion.
 * With time, competence area will emerge. For instance, intuitively, Xav’ for technical issues, community support and free software issues, Aurélien for game design and game play issues, David for administration and business issues. But, no matter what, it is really important that we all tree stay involve on each matters, and always try to give our point of view/interrogations.
 * That led us to the problem that we share unequal competences. For instance, I don’t know anything about computers, and I’m not really ease writing in English. The question was, facing a technical discussion, should I give it up ? or going off the radar (this mean giving a call to Xavier so he cans explain me) ? The answer is NO. All the question and clarification shall be asked on the ML. On one side, a lot of people will not share a good enough technical background to understand everything, so, asking questions on the ML will permit the answer to be accessible to anyone who join it. On another side, if we do so, we will show the good example. Anyone can ask anything, always. Nobody should ever be ashamed of his ignorance.
 * On the ML, a point is considered as temporary settled, if :
 * There is an explicit consensus
 * There is an implicit and soft consensus (nobody answer the last thread of the discussion).

Wiki status

 * One other point was : with the existence of the ML, what is the Wiki purpose. Is it meaningful to double everything on the Wiki ? Isn’t there a risk that, if we do so, the Wiki would become a complete mess ?
 * We agreed on the fact that a page on the Wiki should be some sort of photography of a discussion, at a certain time. It’s main purpose is, when someone join us, to make him able to catch up his backwardness just by reading the Wiki (better than reading all discussions archive).
 * Who post on the Wiki and when ? Answer : anyone can post, and it is better to do it as soon as possible. This is the process we propose : if somebody launch a discussion, beginning with a long text, he should also put it on the Wiki. At the end of the discussion, the one who launched it has the responsibility of putting the result on the Wiki. Later on, area of competence will emerge, and the one “in charge” of one area will update the wiki.
 * To avoid that the Wiki becomes a mess, we are going to reorganize it. When a launchpad instance will be installed, propositions/ideas will have three possible label : “coded and implemented”, “being coded”, and “in discussion”.

Benevolent dictatorship

 * We should always try to reach consensus by discussion. However, in case a consensus can't be reached within the community, the community leadership council votes to take a decision and allow the project to move forward (see Benevolent Dictators). The current members of the council are: David Blanchard, Aurelien Blanchard and Xavier Antoviaque.

Once again, do not hesitate to ask question.

Difference between financing a task and cheking in it

 * Who can finance a task ? Any member of the community can finance a task, a feature that he wants to implement in the game, even if the community has not yet decided if it will be implemented.
 * Who decide what is implemented in the game ? The community will be represented by a leadership committee (composed of community-approved arbitrator) that will decide what will or not (or not now) be implemented. At the beginning, it will be composed by Xavier, David and Aurélien, but after, I would be open to other involved individual.

The proxy problem

 * Xav spend a long time explaining me the technical problem with H4ck-It. I am going to try to explain it again for people like me.
 * The first problem was that, when people play H4ck-It, their browser window is split in 3 : there is the browser frame (with the URL), the H4ck-It frame, with our tool-bar, and the actually visited webpage. The problem is that browsers don’t allow another frame to have access to their information (fearing theft and… hackers). The consequence is that the hack tool bar has no idea on which page the player is. The solution is to reroute the player request through our server (the famous and mysterious “Proxy”), which then lead him to the site he wanted to go. But still, some sites will still be unrecognizable by the hack toolbar.
 * In term of gaming experience, we don’t believe it will have huge consequence. Ok, some pages will be unhackable. That’s not really a problem, but we’ll see.
 * The second problem is the player’s privacy. If a player is logged in and type a password, because of the proxy, we would be potentially able to access his password and his data. We believe that, if we are really clear on that, and because of the game universe, it should be okay.

Roadmap

 * On the Wiki, we have a roadmap, with David, Xavier and Aurelien’s tasks, plus estimated deadline. If you want to participate on these projects, feel free to inform this Roadmap. It helps to know who’s doing what and when on this kind of project.

That’s all, folks !