Re: Issues with minute taking

On 7/6/09 9:22 AM, Cameron McCormack wrote:
> 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

Yeah, but we rarely do this. And I'm thinking more about when the scribe misses
something and someone else just wants to make sure that line is captured.

> 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.

There's a chat window in etherpad, expandable on the right.

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

I'd imagine the bots could be informed of the URL of the minute page at the
start of the telcon, and they could then monitor the page and edit it on the fly
to add these links. :-)

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

I'm guessing a page could be created to submit the URL of the minute page. That
would be dead simple to use.

> 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).

Anyways, the above are good points and my suggestions require work, which
requires time that would be better spent on other things at this stage. I'm not
going to pursue this, but I still think collaborative doc editing along the
lines of etherpad or google docs would make for a superior workflow at some
point in the future.

Jonathan

Received on Monday, 6 July 2009 07:59:30 UTC