Re: [Minutes] VC WG 2022-11-23

Snorre,

I was not at the call yesterday, so I do not want to comment on the specific issues; I let the participants help you out.

For the general question, however: scribing is done by a human. Namely, people on the call take turns to be "scribes": they use IRC to write down what they hear people are saying, following some minor rules on how to do that (precede what they write with the IRC nickname of the person talking, that sort of things). The chair of the meeting manages the queue, so that everyone can take his/her turn.

This, sort of, linear flow is intertwined with all participants being able to type on IRC, adding their own comments, +1 or -1, etc. These are comments out of the natural flow of the minutes (and not typed by the scribe).

At the end of the meeting the IRC log is dumped (via a bot running at W3C) onto our server and is available by everyone. Furthermore a script takes this raw log and turns it into something more readable. There are several such scripts that evolved over the years; the historical one generates an HTML file; since we have moved to github to manage the WG's web site, I use a different script that I have developed and maintained over the years, which converts these logs to markdown, which is then displayed by the CMS system (jekyll) that generates what you see. Actually, the raw IRC logs are usually "cleaned up" before feeding it to the script, taking care of spelling mistakes, possibly adding some manual formatting to the lot, etc.

Bottom line: it is a human. And it is a very difficult job to do those irc minutes well, some are better at it than others, but it is never perfect.

W3C has experimented with some automatic minuting, but the results were never acceptable. Without knowing the technical context, those tools have produced crazy, sometimes hilarious results… Other groups have chosen shared tools like google docs or markdown pads, but the issue is, usually, that it is unclear where to store and archive those minutes for long term (these minutes are supposed to be readable in many years to come, when we may be out of W3C already…).

I hope this helps,

Ivan

> On 24 Nov 2022, at 11:18, Snorre Lothar von Gohren Edwin <snorre@diwala.io> wrote:
> 
> I want to dig into how the scribing works.
> Since these meetings are usually at a very difficult time for me I stick with reading the transcripts to be up to date.
> I have a responsibility to my role as invited expert.
> 
> But there are situations in the transcript where there is information lost.
> For this particular example
> 
> There are two places I see people give +1 to Orie without Ories context being documented. There is a comment that gives a small summary with their +1, but I dont know if that is enough.
> They also usually end very abruptly, feeling like there is something missed.
> 
> Is this scribing done by a human only or assisted by a robot?
> Are there any current issues of the scribing process we want to improve or implement that are on hold because of time?
> ᐧ
> 
> On Thu, Nov 24, 2022 at 6:31 AM Ivan Herman <ivan@w3.org <mailto:ivan@w3.org>> wrote:
> Minutes are here:
> 
> https://www.w3.org/2017/vc/WG/Meetings/Minutes/2022-11-23-vcwg <https://www.w3.org/2017/vc/WG/Meetings/Minutes/2022-11-23-vcwg>
> 
> Cheers
> 
> ivan
> 
> ----
> Ivan Herman, W3C
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> mobile: +33 6 52 46 00 43
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> 
> 
> --
> Snorre Lothar von Gohren Edwin
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----
Ivan Herman, W3C
Home: http://www.w3.org/People/Ivan/
mobile: +33 6 52 46 00 43