“The least productive people are usually the ones who are most in favor of holding meetings.”
Thomas Sowell.
Massive OSS projects can tend to spawn massive numbers of meetings with the intent of keeping everyone informed of all the moving parts.
Have you ever stopped to think about how much each of your meetings costs? Let’s say you have 10 people in your 1 hour meeting, people who are on $1000 per 8 hour workday. At $125 per hour, that’s $1,250 for you meeting. If the objective of the meeting is to make a $500 decision then it’s unlikely to have any chance of being a productive meeting.
Unfortunately most of the major OSS transformation projects I’ve worked on have been overwhelmed by meetings. On one such project, a great program manager ran things differently, with much success. If your OSS project is stagnating due to scope change, documentation and meetings, I really recommend clicking on the link and determining how you can borrow from his techniques and see whether they can work on your project.