Online Collaboration and Discussion
The primary activity for this group is in-person gatherings to carry out actual administration or development tasks. However, everybody's time is scarce; there are only so many hours available in the evening before retiring for the next day's work. In order to maximise the time spent during physical sessions, participants ought to conduct as much discussion and research online prior to the scheduled meeting.
The VSTS forum has been designated as the central location for participants to collaborate and communicate their findings, experience, doubts, or confusion. There is no stopping members from talking to each other verbally, but leaving a "record" on the forum allows staggered communication among members who could not participate in real-time conversations.
For this reason, VSTS Activist members are encouraged to frequent the VSTS forum and keep up to date with current discussions taking place.
Ways to automatically get updates from discussions
- Subscribe to the VSTS forum RSS feed. Use an RSS reader to pull updates regularly from the forum.
- Use Forum Subscriptions to subscribe for new posts in the VSTS forum via email, even for threads one has not participated in.
Staging Area
The hardware resources to support these practical activities are provided by Aaron (icelava). He has a Dell PowerEdge T300 server with x64 Windows Server 2008, serving as a Hyper-V host. All work are done in a virtual environment using virtual guest machines.
Most meetings would end up at Aaron's house, where it is fast and convenient to access the virtual environment. At further stages of maturity, remote access can be configured to allow meetings to take place outside with accessibility to the virtual servers. In addition, more sophisticated setups like distributed team environments may extend the infrastructure to other members' homes.