[MAINTENANCE] Updates to minutes/archival system

Hey folks,

The purpose of this email is to document how our latest
transcription/archival system works. This is an attempt to reduce the
amount of tribal knowledge needed to operate the infrastructure for
our community.

Some of you might have noticed that our meeting transcription summary
emails got stuck during the last half of December 2025. This was due
to Google deprecating the gemini-2.0-flash-lite model causing the
summary emails to fail. The summarizer has been updated to
gemini-2.5-flash, so everything should be working again. The archival
process didn't fail; meetings continued to be archived. The step that
generates the transcript summary and sends it to the mailing list is
the thing that failed. I expect the AI parts of the infrastructure to
keep breaking due to the "move fast and break things" nature of the
companies deploying LLMs. That was the fourth such breaking change
made just last year to the APIs -- we'll continue to fix things as
they get broken; the instability pain is worth having to not use human
scribes.

While fixing that, I also took some time to reduce some "bus factor"
in the infrastructure. The archival process has been running on my
personal machine for the last year (so I could debug issues as they
arose, and because the way these Google/LLM APIs work were a total
pain to put into Github Actions). All that said, we now have a Github
Action that will run every weekday at 6:30pm ET to perform any meeting
archival for the day. The process, with some successful runs, can be
found here:

https://github.com/w3c-ccg/w3c-ccg-archiver/actions/workflows/archive.yaml

That uses the general CG Archival tool that can be found here:

https://github.com/w3c-ccg/cg-archiver/

We need better documentation on the whole setup, but it's all
automated and running in Github Actions now. In theory, someone else
could pick it up and improve it from here.

No action is required by anyone at this point. Just providing an
update in case others wanted to improve the current set up.

-- manu

-- 
Manu Sporny - https://www.linkedin.com/in/manusporny/
Founder/CEO - Digital Bazaar, Inc.
https://www.digitalbazaar.com/

Received on Monday, 5 January 2026 15:37:44 UTC