Developer Area/Developer Meetings/Chair Duties

Since we have stopped using the IRC meetings, we now need the Chair role to lead the meeting and a Minute Taker to keep track of the topics that were saved using the meetbot.

Before the meeting

Chair

• 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
  • 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

Chair

• Open the meeting
• Start by asking participants to state their name at the beginning of the meeting. 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 there are long silences, try to ask questions to elicit comments or state that you are moving on to the next topic.
• Close the meeting when it's done

Minute taker

• If a participant says something that should appear in the minutes, takes notes as an #idea or #info depending on the context.
• Take notes about topics, ideas, general information, agreed items and actions to be taken. For more information about what they should include, check the meetbot commands for the descriptions.

After the meeting

Minute taker

• Add links to the Minutes 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.

Old IRC

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