Developer Area/Developer Meetings/Chair Duties

Before the meeting

• Hint: "watch" the agenda wiki page to receive email notifications when someone adds something to it
• 1 week before the meeting, send a reminder to the developer forum.
• 1 day before the meeting, send a reminder to the developer forum.
• The day of the meeting
  • Make sure MeetBot is running. You should see a user named "mahara-meetbot" in the #mahara-dev channel.
    • If it's not there, ask a developer to make sure it's running.
    • If no one can start it up, have someone save their IRC logs, and they can be processed by MeetBot in offline mode later.
  • In order to save typing time, have the text for the agenda topics as well as "Items from last meeting" prepared so that you just need to copy and paste them.
  • Pick the proposed date and time for the next meeting (to be discussed at the end of the meeting).

During the meeting

• Open the meeting with #startmeeting followed by a title for the meeting, e.g.: "#startmeeting 53rd Mahara Developer meeting"
• Start by asking participants to state their name at the beginning of the meeting, preceeding it with #info. Those participants who say something in the meeting are listed at the bottom of the minutes, but others may not say anything, but are still present.
• If a participant writes something that should appear in the minutes, repeat / rephrase it either with #idea or #info depending on the context if he hasn't done so himself.
• If there are long silences, try to ask questions to elicit comments or state that you are moving on to the next topic.
• When the meeting is done, close it with #endmeeting

Meetbot commands

• The full documentation of MeetBot is online here: http://meetbot.debian.net/Manual.html manual. The main commands we use are:
  • #startmeeting [topic]: Use this at the beginning to start the bot recording and declare yourself the chair
  • #topic : Introduce a new topic
  • #idea : Used if someone introduces a new Mahara idea
  • #info : Generic info you want to show up in the minutes
  • #agreed : Use this to indicate when an agreement is reached
  • #action : Use this when someone is assigned an action item
  • #link : Use this to highlight a URL
  • #undo : Undoes the last minute item, but only the chair can do this.
  • #endmeeting: Closes the meeting, and generates and uploads the meeting minutes files.

After the meeting

• If #mahara-meetbot was running, it should automatically upload the logs into git repo and meetbot.mahara.org
  • If not, then send the logs to a developer to run MeetBot in offline mode and upload them.
• Add links to the Minutes and IRC Log on the Developer Meetings page.
• Create an entry for the next meeting on the same page along with an empty Agenda page.
• Announce the date (on the developer forum) for the next meeting (linking to the empty Agenda page, you may put a link to worldclock) and link to the minutes of the meeting that just ended.

Additional suggestions

• Deadline for agenda items. Anything not added gets pushed to the next meeting
• Have a future meeting agenda items page on the wiki (final row in the table) for items not going into the schedules meeting

Useful links

• Developer Meeting Guidelines discussion on the forum.
• https://wiki.mahara.org/wiki/Developer_Area/Developer_Meetings/MeetBot for info about running the bot