Regular open meeting/update moment?

Common Voice
#1

Hi everyone,

An idea that resulted from the meetings we had with some contributors and staff two weeks ago, was that it might be valuable to have a regular moments in time where anyone can participate and know where the project is, what’s next and engage into a conversation (or even present some local work).

I’m opening this topic to get some feedback:

  • What are the kind of things you would like to know on regular basis about Common Voice? How do you get and consume this information now?
  • Would you be interested in presenting some local work or feedback?
  • Do you prefer real-time or async iterations?

(I know initially we talked about a regular meeting, but I want to avoid talking about specific solutions for know and get more feedback on the problem we want to solve)

Thanks for your time!

/CC @ftyers @lissyx @Michael_Maggs @irvin @mkohler @dabinat @jf99 @belkacem77 @keikkun @Mte90

2 Likes
#2

Sorry, I missed all online meetings due to plenty of reasons.
As I’m involved in almost all Mozilla’s projects, but also other open projects and some actions/activities within my lang community (training, conferences…), and along with my job, it’s hard to get a regular time for a specific project.
I suppose most volunteers are in the same configuration as I am.
I’m posting from time to time actions/activities we are organizing here in Kabylia. Recently, most of them are CV related.
I’d prefer keeping asynch communication.

2 Likes
#3

I’d like to know information that can help me contribute most efficiently to the project. I don’t want to put a lot of work into something and then have it rendered moot a week later by a decision or feature I didn’t know was coming. So some public roadmap, some idea of what Mozilla is currently working on or just a short-term priority list would be very helpful.

It would be useful for Mozilla to make a list of work that currently needs doing, or a list of “stretch goals” they don’t currently have the resources to accomplish, that the community might be able to pitch in and help with. In other words, tell us clearly how best we can help the project.

I also think the community needs to be involved in pre-validation for things like dataset releases and wiki dumps. I know some volunteers were involved in that but I was not aware it was occurring so that type of thing could be communicated better.

I would also appreciate some stats that could help identify problem areas. For instance, I suspect that validation is a bottleneck (in English at least) because validation may not be promoted enough on the site, but I have no stats to back this up. So stats on things like basic usage, how long it takes a clip to get two votes, how many skips occur, how many people listen to their recordings before submission, how much sentence repetition occurs, etc, would be extremely helpful. The stats on the homepage aren’t useful enough and it’s hard to tell where the project even is - the homepage says English has over 850 validated hours but once you strip out duplicates it seems to be somewhere around 100 hours. If better stats were available, perhaps the duplicates issue would have been realized and resolved sooner. Useful and accurate stats can help volunteers ensure their time contributes positively to the project and problem areas can be targeted.

Finally, in terms of format, I think there are too many people in too many timezones for live meetings to work. But I don’t think this needs to be overly complicated. I like how the DeepSpeech team has a meeting every week and then posts a basic summary of what was discussed, although I would prefer something a little more detailed with the ability to make comments.

3 Likes
#4

  • For now the discourse platform is satisfactory, I can get the information I need.

  • Of course, at the time I’ll present what we have locally.

  • I prefer real time scrum meetings.

#5

I feel that what’s needed for the contributors is just what @dabinat said. I couldn’t have put it better myself.

I know that staff time is limited and that many don’t have the time to take on board detailed community comments on GitHub or Discourse. But some sort of pre-review of major initiatives with the community would be very helpful in ensuring that volunteer concerns and suggestions are picked up at an early stage, rather than having to be sorted out after the event.

In terms of the platform for doing it, I’m less concerned, but I would like to see some fairly formalised mechanism with communication built-in; something that goes beyond the current reliance on the goodwill of @nukeador and his community team. A representative from the Deep Speech team would help, as the community often has questions or suggestions that require a knowledge of what the ML specialists would like in their ideal corpus.

There may be a role for private or semi-private discussions with certain ‘core’ volunteers, which could include real-time online meetings. Where necessary you could ask some volunteers to sign a continuing NDA.

#6

Thanks for this everyone, this is tremendously useful for me and for the team and reinforces some of the previous assumptions we had.

Next week we have the Common Voice monthly staff meeting and I’ll check with the team the best way to share the updates there and also open a space for participation.

1 Like
#7

  • It would be interesting to have progress reports and growth in addition to some information of what happens in the internal development something like a blog that can be shared with people who are not from the project.

  • At the moment if we have a project to implement but is still very young common voice to give it forward with it, but if we are pending to present.

  • Some sessions in real time would be very interesting.