Jita Park Speakers Corner

Hi all,

For those not familiar with my blog, I'll be writing a weekly "what it's like to be on CSM" post on my blog, scheduled for every Sunday night. I've now written two of these.

Here's "week zero":
http://jestertrek.blogspot.com/2013/05/csm8-status-week-zero.html

and here's "week one":
http://jestertrek.blogspot.com/2013/05/csm8-status-week-one.html

I welcome feedback, suggestions, comments, or whatever either on this thread or as blog post comments, or privately (if you like) in direct EVE mail to me. I'll follow this post with the full text of the first two posts in this series so those who don't want to go to my blog don't have to. Each week, I'll post the latest weekly status into this thread. Enjoy!

CSM8 status: Week one

Turns out this CSM thing really is a lot of work. ;-)

This week, I feel like CSM8 officially "took office" even though not all of us have signed our NDAs yet.(1) We seem to have our "CSM" flags on the EVE Online forums, and more importantly, this week we received access to the private area of the EVE Online forums that's reserved for CSM NDA conversations.

And that was a lot of reading and a fair bit of writing, I'm not gonna lie. I'm still not even close to done with all of it. I'm not a big forum guy on my best day, and the EVE Online forums aren't my favorite way of reading forums. This is mostly because the EVE-O forums method of showing "new posts" is really unintuitive which makes keeping up with threads kind of a chore. Perhaps there is some easier way of managing it? I really must speak with Malcanis about this. The guy is really a wizard and keeping up with EVE-O forum threads.

CSM8 is also now fully integrated into four major Skype channels:

1. one for CSM8 members only;
2. one a transition channel between CSMs 7 and 8;
3. one for discussions between CSM8 and any CCP dev that wants to join; and,
4. a "business only" channel for Team Five-Oh, which is the team we'll be acting as a stake-holder for the work of.

If you've read the (in)famous Darius III leak, then you're pretty familiar with the third one. It's an informal channel that mixes non-business chit-chat, formal requests for information from CCP or CSM8, informal requests for such information, and the very occasional official business notification of some sort. Most of the time, it's pretty low-key (today, for instance, much of it centered on the SCL with occasional discussion of this or that faction battleship or battle cruiser).

But I'm pleased and interested to report that from time to time, a CCP dev comes in and is serious about soliciting CSM feedback about topics. The tricky part about writing about this is knowing where the line on the NDA is. So for now, I'll just say that if you're watching the various public developer threads on the EVE-O forums for CSM tags, you can probably get a pretty good idea of what we're commenting on in the Skype channel.

The fourth channel is for official business only. The informal chit-chat goes into the third channel. As a result, the fourth channel is both more serious and much more focused. It's pretty common to get 500-600 lines per day in the third channel. There's another 500-600 per day in the second channel which is also very active (more on that in a second). The fourth channel only springs to the forefront if something is actually going on.

I write all of this to make it clear how really inconsequential D3's leak really was. He leaked the least interesting bits of the least interesting Skype channel. It still has some NDA stuff in it and you're going to find me treading cautiously about it when I write about it, but in terms of actual CSM business, it's pretty small beer by comparison. Whatever makes him happy, I guess.

Anyway, keeping up with these four Skype channels is a lot of work, and a lot of what's written in there points back to feedback threads either on the main EVE-O forums or on the private CSM EVE-O forums. Several CSM8 members have been really fantastic about staying up to date with the forums and providing good feedback, notably Malcanis, Ali Aras, Korvin, Sort Dragon, and mynnna. As far as the Skype channels, I'd say off-hand right now that ten out of fourteen CSM8 members are fully engaged with the Skype convos. So we're a really really active bunch when compared to past CSMs!

The next major activity for CSM8 this week was our very first stake-holder meeting with Team Five-Oh. Unfortunately for me, this was scheduled for Friday morning at 4am my time... not exactly ideal. ;-) But I committed myself to being there and it was a really interesting process! Happily, I can share a good bit of this because how the stake-holder process works generally and how CCP's development process works specifically was also covered at a Fanfest session.

CCP works in two week "sprints". Each team and team member commits to performing specific tasks laid out for them by management based on stake-holder input (of which the CSM is one such) during each sprint. Devs generally only commit to completing tasks within a single sprint. Anything forward of that is subject to change at the stake-holder meetings which happen every two weeks between sprints. There's a normal sprint review that happens on Wednesday and the work done to that point is reviewed and "course-corrected" with the internal stake-holders. Normally for Team Five-Oh, the CSM stake-holder review is Thursday but this week it was pushed back to Friday morning due to a holiday of some sort in Iceland.

For our first stake-holder meeting, the CSM8 members that attended (of which I was one, obviously) were back-stopped by a pair of CSM7 members acting as transition members, Hans Jagerblitzen and Two step. But once the NDA stuff started rolling, they left the meeting and it was just CSM8 members participating. Now at this point, obviously, we're pretty late in the development cycle in the run-up to Odyssey so the changes that CSM8 can affect even within a stake-holder meeting are pretty small. "Feature creep" is something I'm really familiar with in my real-life job and it's a big concern at this point in the development cycle. So the NDA'ed portion of the meeting mostly involved the devs showing us the final tweaks going into features for Odyssey and getting our feedback on those tweaks. This is handled through video conferencing with the devs involved, and screen sharing as they show us what they're working on. Interesting stuff, but not particularly top secret yet. Pretty much everything we saw is now on Singularity.

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Fantastic work Ripard and many thanks.

This is the kind of thing the CSM has been in dire need of for a long time, long may it continue

Someone jumped the gun? No news about who was voted in yet!

And finally, CSM8 has successfully voted on our officers with the first vote. You'll be hearing the results of that on Monday. I suspect some of you may be surprised how that went.

That's what it said above.

The one genuine surprise: I was not expecting Kesper North to get Secretary--mostly because I don't know much about him. Good luck to all the officers!

Great work on the posts. I would suggest a sticky be added and a new thread header with your title so people will see it as an official communication from the CSM.

Good luck

from CSM8: One Single Post > One Entire Year

I learned more about how the CSM and CCP work together in a single post by Ripard Teg than I did during the entire term of CSM7.

That post was simply Ripard Teg explaining about his first week as a CSM8 representative. Yet he packed more useful and revealing information into those thirteen hundred words than CSM7 did in an entire year of communication.

I'm very glad that I placed Ripard Teg second on my CSM8 ballots (behind Psychotic Monk), and I've little doubt his weekly CSM posts will continue to be revealing and insightful.

In one single post. CSM8 communication has already outstripped CSM7 communication in usefulness. With stalwarts such as Mynnna, Ripard Teg, Ali Aras and Malcanis, CSM8 is certainly looking to be the CSM we all wish we had the last twelve months.

I should also mention the Google Hangout that Ali Aras hosted last weekend. While loose and freeform, it was certainly a good first attempt at connecting with the community. As she gets a better handle on the format, I'm sure those Hangouts will only become more useful to her and the community that follows her representation.

The following entry has lots and lots of links. To view the links, I suggest reading this one on my blog, here:
http://jestertrek.blogspot.com/2013/05/csm-status-report-week-two.html

I apologize, but it's tough to do the link conversion from blogspot to EVE-O forum format. Maybe later in the year I'll figure out an easy way to do it.

---snip---

CSM status report: Week two

Reading reading reading reading reading. Trying to stay ahead of EVE Online forum posts, private chats, Skypes, Twitter, EVE mail, pod-casts (though that's not reading, of course). This CSM thing continues to be an enormous amount of work! And thank you to all of you that have taken the time to drop me a line or send me a comment! As always, there's some fun stuff to share.

Early this week, CCP Dolan announced that CSM8 had chosen our officers:

* Chairman: Trebor Daehdoow
* Vice Chair: Ripard Teg
* Secretary: Kesper North
* Vice Secretary: Ali Aras

Surprised? I suspect a lot of people were. Set's Chaos was surprised, for instance, and published a rather amusing article talking about his surprise on TMC. He recognizes that we got this done in a single vote, and attributes it to apathy with a quote from mynnna. The quote is accurate, but Set's caught mynnna at the end of a long work-day. mynnna had forgotten his own Google document that listed who wanted what post. For the record, there were a few candidates for each post. No big deal. It certainly wasn't anything like the biggest mistake made by a CSM member this week. That was all mine, baby. ;-)

The rest of the CSM has apparently started a pool: how long until Ripard NDA-blogs himself right off the CSM? Let's hope it's next May.

Anyway, all of us on CSM8 had ourselves a grin at this initial TMC article, particularly because several of us had already been interviewed or contacted by Rhavas for a more definitive CSM8 officer article. He was quick to reassure us that Set's article wasn't it. I have to admit, though, I had a personal amused moment. I suspect my feelings when I read Set's article were mirrored by Seleene, Alekseyev Karrde, and a few other members of CSM7 from time to time when I would write something. Ah well.

Anyway, Rhavas's article came out the 17th and is terrific. I strongly encourage you to go out and give it a read. It's the clearest possible picture you could get of how the officer selection process went. There's pretty much nothing I would add to the article and the quotations from me are accurate and sum up how I feel the officer voting went. So go give it a few minutes of your time. I want to compliment Rhavas on a fine job here!

Currently going through the five stages of grief is Poetic Stanziel. He's currently somewhere between "Anger" and "Bargaining." His article "It is time to get rid of CSM titles" is an absolute riot! This blog post can be roughly summed up as "Trebor won a Grammy?! This proves the Grammies are freaking worthless. End them. Now." At one point, Poe indicates there have been few or no CSM officers that have done anything worth a damn in the positions. I dispute this in the strongest terms. Anyone who doubts Mynxee owned that Chair title is flat wrong, and TeaDaze was the finest Secretary any CSM has ever had. And that's just two people that jumped into my head reading his piece.

Onward. I'm hoping to announce the date of the first CSM Town Hall in a couple of days. Many of the CSM have agreed to my preliminary schedule for six town halls this year. I want two town halls each on either side of the two summits, one during the mid-summer lull in CCP activities, and one during the run-up to the CSM9 election. I'm also building up support for the monthly "Features and Ideas" meeting that I mentioned last week, with buy-in from a number of CSM members and (this week) a couple of CCP devs, interested to see what we up-vote. Ali Aras has been running a series of "Space Hangouts". Check out her G+ page for details on that, or it'll be on her blog very soon. She also did a pretty interesting analysis on the CSM8 voting trends.

Note to self: get the CSM8 bloggers into the "Infrequent but Important" section of this blog.

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Just to give you a heads up Ripard, I clicked on the link to Kesper North's post from the blog and it gave me a 404'd page.

Edit: And I can't find the post in his history either.