Re: Issues with minute taking

Hi Jonathan.

Jonathan Watt:
> There are two things that have been bugging me about minute taking:
> 
>  1) only one person can be the scribe

You can switch scribe mid-session by doing

  ScribeNick: someonelse

and then that person can take over.

>  2) having to use regular expressions to correct the minutes is slow
>     (having to type both the text to remove, and the text to replace
>     it with) and tricky

It’s not the easiest, I agree, especially without feedback about what
substitution it will make.

> After our mishap with the bot last week causing Anthony to have to
> generate the minutes manually, it got me wondering if we don't have
> better tools than IRC for minute taking nowadays. For example, using
> the following would be easy, and solve both of the concerns above:
> 
>   http://etherpad.com/
> 
> Thoughts? Downsides?

I think downsides includes:

  * Being a separate window, so switching between IRC client for
    non-minuted discussion / Zakim control / trackbot interaction
    and the browser window for etherpad would be annoying.

  * Not including trackbot interaction in the minutes (e.g. when
    typing "ISSUE-xxxx?" or "ACTION: blah") without having to
    copy and paste it over.

  * Not being able to automatically upload to
    http://www.w3.org/YYYY/MM/DD-svg-minutes as RRSAgent can.

IMO, off the top of my head.  I think I would rather have the bots
improved to overcome their limitations than move to a web-based minuting
thing, unless that web thing could integrate with the other tools we
need (like tracker for issues/actions and Zakim for phone bridge
management).

-- 
Cameron McCormack ≝ http://mcc.id.au/

Received on Monday, 6 July 2009 07:22:57 UTC