Re: preparing good minutes for working group meetings, with the meeting of 2023 March 02 as an example

There are ways for the scribe to make substitutions to lines of the meeting 
log by entering substitution commands to IRC, but I don't know of any way for 
the scribe to fix up agenda items after the fact without actual editing of the 
log.   Missing agenda item headings form the most significant problem that I 
see with the minutes of working group meetings.  So it appears to me that 
there needs to be a way for scribes to edit the logs so that accurate minutes 
can be generated.

peter


On 3/3/23 03:58, Pierre-Antoine Champin wrote:
> Thanks Peter for this,
> 
> a few comments/precisions below,
> 
> On 02/03/2023 20:11, Peter F. Patel-Schneider wrote:
>> TL;DR: See the attached file for modifications to today's meeting log.
>>
>> Here are some notes on how the working groups might be able to have better 
>> minutes of its meetings.
>>
>> The meeting minutes are prepared from the IRC messages occuring during the 
>> meeting.  Everyone at the meeting should be looking at the working group IRC 
>> channel - #rdf-star on irc.w3.org - during the meeting.
>>
>> There are a number of W3C services that listen in on the channel, send 
>> messages to the channel, and perform actions outside the channel.  Zakim and 
>> agendabot keep track of the agenda.
> Zakim also keeps track of the queue (hint, hint ;-)
>> RRSAgent publishes the log of the meeting.  Commands to these services are 
>> needed to ensure that the meeting log contains appropriate information to 
>> generate good minutes.   Commands are needed to start and end the meeting 
>> and associate a topic with it, to set up and progress through the agenda, to 
>> record attendance, to set up a scribe, and to generate a draft log and 
>> minutes of the meeting.  (It would be really nice if most of these commands 
>> were performed automatically.) There are also commands that can be used 
>> perform substitutions in the minutes.
> Some level of automation exists, e.g. "Zakim, start meeting" makes Zakim send 
> some intructions to RRSAgent.
>>
>> If everything is done correctly, a draft log shows up shortly after the end 
>> of the meeting and can be read by anyone (with a W3C account?).  For 
>> example, the draft minuteslog of the meeting of 2023 March 2 showed up at 
>> https://www.w3.org/2023/03/02-rdf-star-irc.  Then formatted minutes showed 
>> up at https://www.w3.org/2023/03/02-rdf-star-minutes.html and were 
>> summarized in 
>> https://www.w3.org/services/meeting-minutes?channel=rdf-star&num=200
>>
>> The problem is that all this currently happens without any intervention from 
>> the scribe to fix up problems in the minues.
> I have tried to make these post-meeting fixes... but then I was absent for the 
> last calls (this is a "giving a fish, teaching to fish" situation, I guess). 
> This should indeed be considered a responsibility of the scribe, although I am 
> happy to help with this when I'm here.
>>   These problems can include scribing mistakes that were not picked up by 
>> substitution commands, incorrect agenda item boundaries, and missing or 
>> incorrect agenda items.   Ideally it should be possible to edit 
>> https://www.w3.org/2023/03/02-rdf-star-irc (or, even better, a version of 
>> this page without less markup) and have the formatted minutes and the 
>> summary regenerated.
>>
>> I downloaded https://www.w3.org/2023/03/02-rdf-star-irc and edited them to 
>> remove a few minor problems.  I've attached the result to this message. 
>> Hopefully this editing process will happen for future working group meetings.
> Thanks for this work... but could I be a pain and ask that you do it again on 
> the /text/ version of the log (accessible by appending .txt to the URL)? I'm 
> really not sure if I can reliably convert the HTMLized log to text in a way 
> that the minute generator will accept...
>>
>> peter
> [1] https://www.w3.org/mid/fb47d41d-1b6b-fb41-c72b-0249319fdcb8@w3.org

Received on Friday, 3 March 2023 15:17:03 UTC