how to participate in Group work; good standing

Dear Group participants,

As you all know and I said numerous times, we've been trying to lower  
every possible barrier for you to participate in this Group. Even so,  
as you already know, there are some procedures we need to follow.

This is an Interest Group, not a Working Group, i.e. we are not doing  
recommendation track work, so the good standing principles [1] do not  
apply here. Anyway, we need to find a balance between our current  
behavior and those.

There should always be a meeting record available. I could not  
participate in the last call and there are no minutes available since  
the person who should have scribed was not present and did not send  
regrets either, and nobody took the responsibility. Please, we all  
need to play our part to make things happen in the Group.
We are currently 36, around 20 participating in calls, we meet every  
two weeks. This roughly means a given participant would only need to  
scribe once every year!

I strongly encourage the Chairs not to allow this situation again in  
the future and *don't* go ahead with a meeting unless a scribe is  
selected first, preferably to scribe on IRC. There is a scribe list  
and procedure about how it works at:
   http://www.w3.org/2007/eGov/IG/wiki/Scribe_List

if your name is missing from there, please add it at the bottom.  
People chairing a meeting are not supposed to scribe but to focus on  
chairing it.

There's also a list of duties and documentation all should be familiar  
with at:
   http://www.w3.org/2007/eGov/IG/wiki/Teleconferences#Scribe_duties

I would also like to ask for your help to identify the people that are  
attending a call. Since not all of you can get into IRC, it's *very*  
difficult to identify who's calling from a given number or who is  
saying what.

Whenever someone joins the call, the system emits a beep. We should  
stop and ask who joined and add him/her to the attendants list on the  
meeting record. Those minutes will help others not in attendance to  
keep track of the Group's work and make the Group accountable as it  
should be.

I want to also take the opportunity to thank those who sent regrets  
and made our work easier, and we'll also try to do our best in sending  
meeting agendas as early in advance as possible, especially now that  
Chairs have a regular call one week before every Group call. You can  
also suggest agenda topics at anytime.

Looking forward to a productive call and F2F meeting.

Best,
Jose.

[1] http://www.w3.org/2004/02/Process-20040205/groups.html#good-standing

--
Jose M. Alonso <josema@w3.org>    W3C/CTIC
eGovernment Lead                  http://www.w3.org/2007/eGov/

Received on Tuesday, 7 October 2008 14:55:41 UTC