At the Face to Face meeting held on the occasion of the ICMC19 Conference in Vancouver, a novelty was introduced: For the last day of the meeting all committers were invited to participate, either personally or remotely via video conference.

Three of us committers (Paul, Nicola, Matthias) came to Vancouver for the conference, so we were able to participate in person, Bernd (DE) and Shane (AU) joined us remotely.

Paul Yang, Matthias St. Pierre, Tim Hudson, Matt Caswell, Richard Levitte, Nicola Tuveri (from left to right)

The group was completed by the OMC members Paul Dale (AU), Kurt Roeckx (BE), Mark Cox (UK).

While Paul Yang had already met the team members during their visit to China in 2017, for Nicola and me it was the first personal encounter. We were both curious and a little bit anxious to find out how we would be received by the long time team members. But it turned out that our worries were unfounded: after passing Tim Hudson’s vegemite survival test (see below), we were both cordially accepted by the team.

Matt started the meeting with a detailed introduction and a status report about the architectural changes to the library and the ongoing FIPS development. After that, we embarked on a lively and fruitful discussion. The outcome of the meeting is a different story and will be reported elsewhere. For us committers, it was an interesting and instructive experience to see how these OMC F2F meetings took place and how actions were planned and decisions made.

But even more important than anything else was the fact that we were able to get to know each other and that we all had a great time together. In this respect the meeting was so successful, that we decided to have online video conference meetings on a regular base in order to improve our team interaction and collaboration.