o7 Capsuleers!

We are excited to share the meeting notes taken from the latest CSM 17 summit, which was hosted at CCP headquarters in Reykjavik, Iceland. This summit was a week-long affair, with CSM members given a day on Friday to have break-out discussions with developers and to share some of their insights with the entire company. As always, the content of the summit included a mix of CSM-requested topics and CCP-proposed sessions, designed to gather valuable feedback on current and future projects. The sessions were quite densely populated with nearly 30 sessions over all.

Changes

I’d like to go over a few changes to the CSM Summit process to provide the most clarity into how and why the summits take place.

Due to COVID and travel restrictions, this was our first in-person summit since CSM 14. While the CSM operated fine without the summit, these are always incredibly valuable moments for both the CSM and CCP, so we wanted to take the opportunity to make a few changes for optimization.

We chose the timing of this summit to coincide with the planning & scoping phase of our next expansion, EVE: Viridian. We decided to take this approach to address some historical complaints regarding the summit, whose dates were not always predicated on development and more oriented toward availability of the CSM. CSM 17 saw an institutional change whereby members were able to contribute to the summit remotely, allowing for more maneuverability. Choosing dates that coincided with development planning meant that the CSM could have the most impact, and their feedback be the most meaningful. While the CSM do not decide which topics CCP work on, they are a crucial tool in helping development teams make necessary decisions for their projects.

The meeting minutes have taken many forms over the years, from the CSM recording their own minutes with final approval by CCP, to direct transcription. Sometimes these documents became incredibly daunting, and we found that players were not consuming the minutes due to their size and style of transcription. During CSM 17’s summit, each meeting was recorded via Teams, and an executive summary was taken to cover the highlights and important details of each meeting. We then sanitized this to remove as few NDA details as possible, and handed them back to the CSM for final comment. We’d love your feedback on if this process afforded easier consumption of the minutes, while providing the same level of understanding of what occurred during the meetings.

The finalized minutes can be found HERE.

CSM 18

The season for CSM 18 is fast approaching, however this year again we will be making a few changes. The purpose of the CSM is to provide input for developers, and after moving back to an expansion release cycle we feel it is important that this existing CSM 17 term be given time to continue providing their feedback on pending topics they’ve discussed with teams at length. To that end, CSM 17 will end their term September 25, 2023, and voting for CSM 18 will begin this August. We believe this is enough time for the CSM to finish ongoing discussions, while facilitating a handover period for the incoming term.

This July we’ll be announcing the key dates for CSM 18 elections, including the campaign period. Similar to CSM 17, CSM 18 will be given the time to provide feedback on the next two expansions, so future elections will ideally be centered around the expansion cadence.

We encourage you to join the dedicated forum thread to discuss the content of the minutes, and to create separate threads for specific sessions if you’d like to provide further ideas or share your perspectives.

Thank you for your continued support, and we look forward to an exciting election season this summer!